^^^ Awesome Ron Paul receives praise from Hillary Clinton, a lighthearted moment: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJky1akj-Vo]YouTube - Ron Paul Didn't Expect This Response From Hillary Clinton - 4/22/2009[/ame] Followed by, "You're going to encourage him!"
Human cloning claims condemned by leading scientists Attempts by Panayiotis Zavos to implant cloned embryos in women are unethical and dangerous, critics claim ahead of TV documentary
Poll: Americans high on Obama, U.S. direction 65 percent still say it's difficult for them and their families to get ahead
Thursday, April 23, 2009 Campaign like a Democrat, trade like a Republican A truly disturbing bit of economic news has come from Obama's new trade representative Ron Kirk. He has stated that it is the intention of the Obama Adm. to go ahead with the trade deals brokered by the Bush Adm. with Panama, Korea and Columbia. They also intend to revive talks with the WTO that broke down last July over agricultural commodities. Remember not being able to buy rice? That's what you get with "free trade". Obama and Kirk are making all the usual vague promises about protecting American workers. Apparently everything Obama said during the campaign about protecting American workers from these destructive "free" trade deals has now been "out sourced". To recover from their lost decade; Japan quietly rebuilt its domestic industries. Japan's government does have a huge debt load even compared to the US, but the difference is that their debt is entirely investments from their retirees. Japan doesn't owe trillions to China and Saudi Arabia. Japan's standard of living continues to improve as ours declines. Japan protects its economy from "free trade"; China, India and Europe do as well. We cannot trade our way out of the mess we are in; we cannot live on a service economy (giving each other haircuts); we cannot rebuild by padding the balance sheets of insolvent banks. We need to make the things we use or accept a third world standard of living.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlFFIB9FZAc]YouTube - The Worst Media Moments of Obama's First 100 Days[/ame]
Think Progress » Wilkerson on investigating or prosecuting Cheney and Rumsfeld: If the public wants it, ‘let’s do it.’
Sunday, April 26, 2009 Death from Corporate Farming, even if you don't eat what they sell Remember when the BCF was trying to scare everybody with the Bird Flu? There was really no chance of Bird Flu ever developing into a human pandemic. Virus can't easily jump from species to species since they are such a simple organism that they cannot digest common sugars and are dependent on predigested sugars found in the bloodstream. These sugars are very different in any species' that aren't closely related. Swine Flu versions have a much easier time making the jump to humans and if it does this enough times the chances of virulent strain (one that is completely adapted to human blood sugar) developing is fairly high. This is an H1N1 Flu, the same type as the deadly 1918 or Spanish Flu that killed about 50 million with about a 2.5% death rate although some put the actual death toll higher than that. The Mexican outbreak appears so far to have a death toll of as high as 7% but this number could be reduced if total number of unreported "mild" cases turns out to be higher. This strain appears to have originated at a Smithfield factory hog farm in Mexico where the shear number of hogs in one place was able to produce a blended virus containing North American human, swine, avian flu components and swine flu components from Asia. Previously this has only been know to occur in South China where millions of pigs, ducks and people live in close quarters with no proper sanitation. The reason these H1N1 strains are so dangerous compared to the other types of Flu that go around all the time is that they tend to trigger an allergy like immune response that causes the lungs to fill with fluid. That is what kills you and not the virus. Ironically the more young and healthy you are; the more at risk you are for sudden death. The 1918 strain was capable of killing in a few hours. The government of Mexico's response of closing all public places including churches is the only effective course of action. In 1918 people would flock to all day prayer services that promised sanctuary from the evil flu. Many people died in their seats and then all the rest being infected would spread the disease far and wide. Influenza is characterized as a very "sloppy" virus, it tears itself apart into eight pieces every time it reproduces by division then reassembles. This means trillions times trillions of chances to mutate plus it tends to pick up scraps of DNA from its host as it does this. This is why the US strain is probably milder than the Mexico City Strain that is killing people. If the deadly version can be contained while the milder version of this strain continues to spread; enough people will be naturally immunized to stop the Killer Pandemic in its tracks. Hopefully.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 Things that don't work World markets slumped today as fears increased about the spread of Pandemic Flu. The World Health Organization issued a statement saying that travel bans don't work. Also from the list of things that don't work. Anti-viral drugs turned out to be totally useless against the Asian Bird Flu that is very similar to the current strain. Since the reports appeared in the media immediately that it does work against this strain and such information could not possibly be available from Mexico; you should assume it to be no more than corporate hype. There is also a problem with counting on a vaccine; there was an in depth study published in the British Medical Journal Lancet that called into question the effectiveness of Flu vaccines. It seems no study that these researchers would characterize as scientifically sound has ever been done on Flu vaccine and the death rate each year moves up and down completely independent of the number of people vaccinated. The Bush Crime Family response to the study was to authorize vaccine for younger patients and boost the PR budget. No new studies were funded. Not all viruses respond to vaccination. While it sounds like it should work; why have they never done a study to prove it? Mexico City is considering a total shut down in order to keep the outbreak from mushrooming beyond their ability to deal with it. This may be the only effective course of action but this requires a level of control that would be nearly impossible to maintain. There are stories from 1918 about towns that attempted to shut themselves off from outside contact and were defeated by things like the mailman coming in. The Flu virus is capable of living 72 hours on a dry surface in cool weather. It would probably take a total quarantine of three weeks and most people don't have the canned goods to last that long not to mention the problems with services. Proper planning and preparedness would have made this possible but after eight years of the Bush Crime Family we are screwed.
"GOP is Specter of its old self" By: John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei April 28, 2009 04:15 PM EST Arlen Specter's break from Republicans is the latest in a trip-hammer series of reversals that leaves the GOP more beaten and less popular than either major party has been in decades. Amid gloating among Democrats and recriminations among Republicans, the Specter divorce is both symptom and cause of the GOP collapse - leaving the opposition party on the brink of irrelevance in Barack Obama's Washington and facing few obvious paths back to power. The Pennsylvania Republican's about-face, combined with the all-but-certain ascension of Minnesota Democrat Al Franken to the Senate, should soon leave Democrats with a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. The last time either party had such a wide Senate margin was during the first two years of Jimmy Carter's term in 1977-1978, when Democrats under then-Majority Leader Robert Byrd held 61 seats. But Specter's abandonment didn't happen in isolation. No matter whether his move was motivated by principle, fear, or opportunism - or some combination of the three - it comes in the same month as a traditionally GOP-leaning district in upstate New York tipped for the Democrats. In the nine states of the Northeast, including Pennsylvania, there are only 15 GOP House members out of 83 seats, and now just three Republicans out of 18 senators. Nationally, Republicans are at or near record levels for unpopularity. In January, Gallup showed Democrats with their greatest advantage in party identification since the organization began polling the question. Democrats have an eight-point advantage, 36 percent to 28 percent. That 28 percent tied the figure for the lowest Republican support ever recorded by Gallup. The most recent precedent for Tuesday's news was when another Northeasterner, then-Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont, left Republicans to become an independent and switched control of the chamber to Democrats. But this is far worse for Republicans. In 2001, Republicans still had the House and the White House. Now they have neither. Instead, they have a Republican National Committee chairman who is drawing weak reviews for gaffes, they have House and Senate leaders - Rep. John Boehner of Ohio and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky - who are more tacticians than public messengers. And there is little prospect of a national GOP spokesman emerging for another three years, until the 2012 election. While many Republicans were jeering Specter as he headed for the exits, few were denying that the move was a setback, both in public perceptions and legislative arithmetic. “It's a huge blow to the Republicans' ability to moderate any of Obama's very liberal positions,†said former Sen. Rick Santorum, who once served with Specter as a GOP senator from Pennsylvania. Tim Griffin, a former top strategist to the Bush-Cheney campaigns, echoed the widely held view of Specter among conservatives: “While I am disappointed to lose a Republican senator, he has long acted like a Democrat and belonged with them. He is finally going home.†But other Republicans said that conservatives have left the Republican party with an exclusionary message. On the national level, said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), “you certainly haven't heard warm encouraging words of how they view moderates. Either you are with us or against us.†What's notable about the Republican collapse is not simply its depth but its velocity. It was just a few years ago, in the wake of George W. Bush's reelection, that books were being written on whether Republicans had acquired a virtually unbreakable hold on the levers of political power. After 2004, Republicans held a ten-vote advantage in the Senate. The last time a political party suffered such grievous losses in the Senate during a compressed period was from 1976-1980, when the Democrats went from a post-Watergate high of 61 seats after Carter's first election, to 45 seats as Ronald Reagan came in. The numbers are almost perfectly reversed: in the last four years, the Democrats have gone from a 45-55 deficit in the Senate after Bush's reelection to 60 seats (or 59 with an asterisk) today. In the category of silver linings, the fluidity of these numbers illustrates that politics can change quickly. Republicans hope that Obama, who is sharpening the lines of debate with big plans on spending, energy, and health care, might himself be an engine of GOP revival. But Republicans will need to squint hard to see good news in the latest numbers. Current polling shows a tight generic ballot contest in the 2010 campaign for the House of Representatives: Pollster.com has Democrats outpacing Republicans by a slim margin of 39.9 percent to 38.6 percent. That's down from a double-digit advantage before the 2008 elections. But even if those numbers hold up, it won't be enough to bring the GOP even close to parity in the House: in order to close the 78-seat gap between the parties, they'd need to run well ahead of the Democrats in generic polling. Alexander Burns contributed to this report. © 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dh8EhmR4IA]YouTube - President Obama On Swine Flu & Arlen Specter[/ame]