Wednesday, January 13th, 2016
Kevin Litten, State Politics Reporter - New Orleans Times-Picayune
Stephan: And here is the antipode to Kentucky. Where Kentucky, with its new Republican Governor is gutting its nationally recognized Kynect state healthsystem, newly elected Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards immediately followed up on his election pledge and signed an executive order which will allow 300,000 people to get healthcare. It is expected to lower Louisiana costs by millions, where Kentucky's change is expected to cost the state tens of millions.
Bel Edwards replaces Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, failed Presidential candidate and another of the failed Republican Red value governors. Like Sam Brownback in Kansas, and Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Jindal took over a state in sound financial condition -- there was a $2 billion surplus -- and left office with a $2 billion budget shortfall, a trashed educational system, a scandalous prison system, and impoverished elders.
Bel Edwards' executive action should be in place by July 1st, and is expected to change the lives of hundreds of thousands of Louisiana citizens for the better. It will be interesting to see how they react.
It is a shame corporate media almost never covers these kind of comparison stories, so very few people seem to know about the glaring differences between Democratic and Republican governance. It all stays in the abstract.
Louisiana Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards signing executive order expanding Medicaid
Credit: Kevin Litten/Times Picyune
Louisiana became the 31st state to expand Medicaid after Gov. John Bel Edwards signed an executive order Tuesday (Jan. 12) that will make more than 300,000 people eligible for the federal health care program.
The news conference marked a major break from the policies of former Gov. Bobby Jindal, who refused to expand Medicaid due to his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislative achievement. Edwards said he plans to discuss his decision to expand Medicaid with Obama when he visits Louisiana on Wednesday.
With his signature, Edwards made Louisiana the first state in the deep South to accept Medicaid funding to care for the working poor considered in “the gap:” too poor to afford private insurance, but making too much money to qualify for the program.
Louisiana expands Medicaid: Are you eligible?
It will also make Louisiana a closely watched Medicaid expansion state due to […]
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Tuesday, January 12th, 2016
Ian Sample , Science Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It is not settled yet, but it is beginning to look like one of the Holy Grails of physics -- the discovery of Gravitational waves -- may have been achieved. A very big deal. More anon...
Not for the first time, the world of physics is abuzz with rumours that gravitational waves have been detected by scientists in the US.
Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State university, tweeted that he had received independent confirmation of a rumour that has been in circulation for months, adding: “Gravitational waves may have been discovered!!”
The excitement centres on a longstanding experiment known as the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) which uses detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana to look for ripples in the fabric of spacetime.
According to the rumours, scientists on the team are in the process of writing up a paper that describes a gravitational wave signal. If such a signal exists and is verified, it would confirm one of the most dramatic predictions of Albert Einstein’s century-old theory of general relativity.
Krauss said he was 60% confident that the rumour was true, but said he would have to see the scientists’ data before drawing any conclusions about whether the signal was genuine or not.
Researchers on a large collaboration like Ligo will have any such paper internally vetted before sending it for publication and […]
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Tuesday, January 12th, 2016
Brian T. Edwards, Crown Professor in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University and Director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies - Salon
Stephan: While I was in Colorado doing the Vail and TED events an Estonian woman, probably about 50, came up to me and asked if I had a moment to talk. I told her yes, and she said, "I heard you speak, and I think you'll tell me the truth." I assured her I would do so to the best of my ability. She sat down and asked me, "Why do Americans hate so much" Why are you so violent?" This was basically the same question I was asked in Sweden a few months earlier, and I told her what I have been saying for some years in the pages of SR and my column in Explore.
The last 25 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have pursued policies supporting an American Exceptionalist view of the world. The Soviet Union was gone we were the boss. It has been an utter disaster, as can be ascertained by spending 10 minutes tracking international headlines. And it has proven almost impossible to stop. I think President Obama had he, alone, been able to chart the course it would have been very different. But he found failure is not a step it's a process and it has inertia. The last seven years have shown it is almost impossible to affect change. We still have Republican Presidential candidates calling for yet more bombing in the Islamic world. They find it very hard to accept the obvious.
Here is an excellent assessment of one of the important aspects of this trend.
U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to U.S. military personnel during a refuel stop at the Thunder Dome at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska, before continuing on for a three-nation tour of Asia, August 4, 2008.
Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing
The news that an al-Qaida recruitment video prepared in Somalia refers to anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and includes footage of Donald Trump shows the profound damage that the Republican front-runner is doing to America’s international image. Trump’s bearing is all swagger, but he and his zealous supporters project a weak and defensive stance to the world. They have redefined the United States as hostile and fearful.
Unwittingly, these right-wing champions of American exceptionalism have brought about the end of the American century. They announce the end of an era in […]
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Tuesday, January 12th, 2016
Kenneth P. Vogel, Chief Investigative Reporter - Politico
Stephan: This is how a small subset of the oligarchy is buying American democracy, and attempting to change American culture. Discretely but straightforwardly they're just following what the rules allow, and backing it with vast sums of money, and very sophisticated thinking.
This report is the best story I have seen on how it is being done.
David Koch (pictured in 2012) .
Credit: AP Photo
The political machine that Charles Koch launched a dozen years ago in a Chicago hotel conference room with 16 other rich conservatives has exploded in size and influence in the past few elections and now eclipses the official GOP in key areas.
Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO’s analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network. And the staggering sum […]
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Tuesday, January 12th, 2016
Antonio Regalado, - MIT Technology Review
Stephan: The ethics of creating chimeras is, well, very nuanced. How much human genetic material does it take to qualify as "human?" Here is a good assessment of where this technology stands.
Injecting cells from one species into the embryo of another creates mixtures called chimeras. From left to right: an ordinary mouse, a mouse that’s partly rat, a rat that’s partly mouse, a white rat.
Credit: MIT Technology Review
Braving a funding ban put in place by America’s top health agency, some U.S. research centers are moving ahead with attempts to grow human tissue inside pigs and sheep with the goal of creating hearts, livers, or other organs needed for transplants.
The effort to incubate organs in farm animals is ethically charged because it involves adding human cells to animal embryos in ways that could blur the line between species.
Last September, in a reversal of earlier policy, the National Institutes of Health announced it would not support studies involving such “human-animal chimeras” until it had reviewed the […]
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