Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
PAUL KRUGMAN, Op-ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: The corruption of the American Congress is so entrenched only a massive citizen outcry can reverse it, and those doing the corrupting have already figured out that they can use fear to protect themselves from that. Witness the Teabagger movement.
We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.
But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.
What - you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.
Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision - namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.
Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation - yes, the same […]
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Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Stephan: More and more I see signs suggesting that willful ignorance frequently results in a kind of self-destructive impulse. This is one such example. A child ought to be able to figure out that net neutrality is in the average person's interest. Just as a child ought to see that the mosque madness works against America's interests, or that universal health care ought to replace the illness profit model. And it ought to be obvious by now that Fox News is a propaganda organization. Yet over and over you see people operating from ignorance working against what would be best for themselves.
A bipartisan coalition in favor of net neutrality has lost a key conservative supporter amid signs that the issue is becoming more divisive.
The Gun Owners of America (GOA) severed ties with the net-neutrality coalition Save the Internet after a conservative blog questioned the association with liberal organizations such as ACORN and the ACLU.
The blog RedState described Save The Internet as a ‘neo-Marxist Robert McChesney-FreePress/Save the Internet think tank’ and questioned why GOA would participate in a coalition that includes liberal groups such as the ACLU, MoveOn.Org, SEIU, CREDO and ACORN.
GOA was one of the charter members of Save the Internet, but a spokesman for the gun rights group said times have changed.
‘Back in 2006 we supported net neutrality, as we had been concerned that AOL and others might continue to block pro-second amendment issues,’ said Erich Pratt, communications director for GOA.
‘The issue has now become one of government control of the Internet, and we are 100 percent opposed to that,’ Pratt said.
Save The Internet had long pointed to the support of gun owners as evidence that net neutrality is a nonpartisan issue.
Net-neutrality advocates are struggling to maintain bipartisan support during an election season that has cast the issue […]
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Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Stephan:
Drinking water before each meal has been shown to help promote weight loss, according to a new study.
Brenda Davy, PhD, an associate professor of nutrition at Virginia Tech and senior author of a new study, says that drinking just two 8-ounce glasses of water before meals helps people melt pounds away.
The study is being presented at the 2010 National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.
‘We are presenting results of the first randomized controlled intervention trial demonstrating that increased water consumption is an effective weight loss strategy,’ Davy says in a news release. ‘We found in earlier studies that middle aged and older people who drank two cups of water right before eating a meal ate between 75 and 90 fewer calories during the meal.’
She tells WebMD that many people substitute sweet-tasting calorie-containing beverages for water.
‘If you look at research on beverage consumption trends, our average intake of sugar-sweetened beverages has increased dramatically in the past three or four decades,’ Davy tells WebMD in an email. ‘So, likely we are drinking other beverages in place of water.’
Drinking Water and Weight Loss
Her study included 48 adults between age 55 and 75 who were divided into two groups.
One group drank two […]
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Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Stephan: 500 million eggs have been recalled (I can't even imagine what that must be like to do). This is yet another crisis arising from the 30 year constant effort on the part of conservative politicians in the pay of corporate interests to deregulate and remove government oversight.
More and more the American food chain has become suspect, particularly where industrial animal husbandry is involved. Ronlyn and I eat only locally produced small farm eggs from free-range chickens given organic feed.
Food safety regulators have warned against eating ‘runny’ eggs
The US food safety agency has predicted more egg recalls as it investigates the source of salmonella-tainted eggs that have sickened as many as 2,000 people.
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr Margaret Hamburg said the agency did not yet know how salmonella had entered the egg supply.
Since May, the US has seen a fourfold increase in salmonella infections.
In the last 10 days roughly 500 million eggs traced to two Iowa companies have been recalled across the country.
‘As we move forward with the recall, we may see some additional sub-recalls over the next couple of days, maybe even weeks as we better understand the sort of network of distribution of these eggs that are potentially contaminated,’ Dr Hamburg said on ABC’s Good Morning America.
‘We are in the midst of probably the largest egg recall that has happened in recent history,’ she said.
‘Avoid runny eggs’
In a round of television interviews on Monday morning, Dr Hamburg warned that eggs from farms in Iowa were sold under different brand names across the country, making it difficult for regulators to trace tainted eggs through the food distribution network.
On 13 August Iowa-based Wright County Egg recalled 380 […]
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
, - Michigan Technological University
Stephan: This is the kind of story I just love to uncover and share with you. Ingenuity finding a use for something that is otherwise just toxic waste. So much of this could be done if we just got our priorities straight.
An entrepreneur from Traverse Bay, Mich., and Michigan Technological University researchers are collaborating on a project to use Upper Michigan’s stamp sand, an unsightly leftover from the mining era, for roofing shingles. Plans are to build a mill to process the stamp sand and supply it to the roofing industry. The mill will be near Gay, Mich., and will employ up to 40 people.
A Michigan Tech materials scientist, Ralph Hodek, and geological mining graduate Domenic Popko also have plans for a longer-term prospect: building a mill to manufacture the shingles themselves, employing up to 300 people.
A roofing shingle is 30 percent asphalt and 70 percent rock. To get the rock, typically manufacturers have to develop a quarry and drill, dynamite and crush the rock. They also have to add copper, which retards the growth of algae, moss and lichen.
The stamp sand is especially attractive for the roofing industry because it’s already been mined and crushed, and it contains copper naturally. The initial operation would use a stretch of stamp sand between Gay and Traverse that is owned by the Keweenaw County Road Commission.
There are about 500 million tons of stamp sand in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan. The biggest deposit, […]
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