The appeal of Sarah Palin, worth a thousand words. From Zaius Nation. Open thread below.
This Devo two-fer from 1980 is a hoot! Girl U Want is by far the strongest of the two songs, Devo at their best. Please forgive the video quality and the occasional audio glitch.
I always felt that Devo was more influential than they really got credit for. They have been honored by plenty of bands -- Nirvana, Soundgarden, Sepultura and Pearl Jam, just to name a few.
(Martin Dies, 1939 - managed to take the lunatic fringe to the lunatic edge)
A few months ago I ran a piece on Martin Dies, and his infamous Dies Committee for Un-American Activities. An earlier incarnation of Joe McCarthy, Dies also managed to slide off the rails with vicious accusations and wild innuendos about people in and around power. Famously fabricating lists of "known communists", many of whom did not exist.
But just before World War 2, paranoia was rife. We were dangling on the precipice of getting involved. The war had already started by the time this address was given on October 27, 1939 and fear of being overtaken by some evil foreign entity was running rampant in the newspapers on the radio and on Capitol Hill.
So Dies took up the crusade, cloaking himself in Americanism and preaching the gospel of fear, whipping people into a state of frenzy.
Martin Dies: These enemies within our country are not easily exposed, it is most difficult to expose fearlessly and without partisanship the termites who have ceaselessly gnawed at the pillars of this republic, because there are those who would like for us to be partisan when the question is involved. I said in the beginning of this investigation that I was determined it would be conducted without fear and without favor and that I would not hesitate to expose any man, whether hes a Democrat or hes a Republican. Whether hes a New Dealer or an anti-New Dealer. Whether he works in the government or whether hes working in industry. Only on that basis can I reconcile my attitude with my conscience. If the time has come when in the interest of political expediency and in behest to demands of party leadership I must qualify my conscience, Ill surrender my commission and go back to private life. At least with my honor unimpaired.
Clearly, fear and paranoia haven't gone out of fashion. And the practitioners of that fear will probably never go broke perpetuating it. The times change, the situations change, the enemies change. But the fear hate and mistrust, then as now, are all the same.
Comforting, isn't it?
If they're already admitting to causing deaths, why should they care about a little girl's hearing?
What more do we have to do to fight back against these horror stories? What will it take to get these insurance companies to see the inherent immorality of focusing on the bottom line to the exclusion of all else? Think Progress:
One of the worst abuses of the private health insurance industry is its practice of denying claims to pay for necessary care for patients. This practice has become so rampant in the industry that a recent study by the California Nurses Association found that a whopping 21 percent of all insurance claims filed in the first half of 2009 in the state of California were denied by insurers.
As the story of six-year-old Madison Leuchtmann of Franklin County, MO, demonstrates, even children are victims of this insurance company abuse. Madison was born with bilateral atresia, which means she lacks ear canals in both ears. In order to hear, she wears a special device on a headband that allows her to make out sounds. Despite her disability, Madison is at the top of her kindergarten class and is slowly learning to read.
Yet Madison, due to her growth, will soon require a new hearing implant to be able to recognize sounds. Her hearing and speech therapist warns that if she doesnt get her implants by age seven, shes not going to be able to blend her words. She wont be able to hear herself [talk]. Madisons pediatrician, Dr. Randall Clary, also insists that without the implant, the girl may never be able to hear again. Unfortunately, the Leuchtmanns family insurer, Cigna, has issued "one denial after another, flatly refusing to cover the $20,000 bill for the implant. In a written statement to the local news station Fox 2, Cigna explained, It is not unusual for commercial benefit plans to exclude hearing assisted devices, prompting Dr. Clary to angrily respond, This is obviously medically necessary. You have a child that has no ear canals! Dr. Clary also told Fox 2 that he sees these sort of denials on a weekly basis.
Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has the details on the intrigue going on in the House yesterday with efforts to finally audit the Federal Reserve and find out where all those trillions of dollars are going.
In an unprecedented defeat for the Federal Reserve, an amendment to audit the multi-trillion dollar institution was approved by the House Finance Committee with an overwhelming and bipartisan 43-26 vote on Thursday afternoon despite harried last-minute lobbying from top Fed officials and the surprise opposition of Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who had previously been a supporter.
The measure, cosponsored by Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), authorizes the Government Accountability Office to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the Fed's opaque deals with foreign central banks and major U.S. financial institutions. The Fed has never had a real audit in its history and little is known of what it does with the trillions of dollars at its disposal.
The amendment expressly blocks Congress from interfering with the independence of monetary policy decision-making, but opponents of the measure said that the political pressure would inevitably follow.
Robert S. Eshelman writes in The Nation:
It was in Germany that Ed Regan realized Gainesville, Florida, was going about things all wrong. The assistant manager at Gainesville Regional Utility (GRU) was out looking for ways to boost his city's renewable energy capacity. "Germany was a game-changer," Regan says. Wind turbines and solar panels seemed to be everywhere. He soon learned the secret.
Before Regan's June 2008 trip, the GRU was trying to promote small-scale renewable energy generation by offering hefty cash rebates to customers who installed solar photovoltaic panels. And it had a "net metering program" that allowed customers who generate their own power to run their electricity meters backward, thereby cutting their electric bills potentially to zero.
But the programs weren't attracting a great deal of interest. The utility's rebate program had yielded only 300 kilowatts of solar power capacity--roughly the amount of electricity used by 160 hair dryers--and it cost a lot of money.
The difference between Gainesville and Germany was that Germany had a national feed-in tariff. Under this system, energy consumers can become renewable energy producers by installing solar panels on their roof or a wind turbine in their backyard and selling their energy to the local utility. These customers-turned-producers receive above-market prices for their energy, often for up to twenty years. With the feed-in tariff, Germany boosted its renewable energy production from 1 percent of its total output in 1995 to 12 percent in 2005. By 2007 renewables supplied 14 percent of Germany's electricity. Denmark and Spain also have successful feed-in tariff programs.
So this past March, Gainesville rolled out its own feed-in tariff. GRU now pays twice the retail cost for every kilowatt of solar power-generated electricity. The extra cost means a small increase in electrical bills for all utility consumers, less than a dollar per month per household.
But in order to keep consumer prices down, the feed-in tariff is limited to expand by only 4 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity per year, for six years. And the first year's quota was snapped up in just two weeks. The program now has a waiting list through 2016. Rather than a bunch of homeowners each installing a few panels, the Gainesville quotas were mostly taken by commercial investors.
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Green Diary Rescues appear on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The diary rescue begins below and continues in the jump. Inclusion of a particular diary does not necessarily indicate my agreement with it.
Rei asked Who's killing the electric car again?: "How did a woman who the SEC says planned one of the largest accounting frauds in US history end up as Chief Financial Officer of Aptera Motors? It's just one of many questions swirling around what appears to be a meltdown in progress at the beleagured manufacturer of safe, hyper-efficient electric vehicles. When a business is running smoothly, there are strong incentives for everyone to be a team player and hide any signs of internal strife. As the rate of layoffs and "vacations" increases, however, so does the potential for leaks. And sometimes a simple name can take you places you never thought you'd go."
David Brin offered a lesson in capitalism with his diary Re-allocating energy research: "The Obama Administration, while pumping up funding and incentives to further develop hybrid vehicles, has slashed $100 million (60%) from the budget for George W. Bushs preferred approach -- hydrogen fueled cars. Of course, this is one more sign that we are being led by people who want America to succeed, and no longer by technological morons, determined to make every possible wrong decision. Why am I so fierce in my appraisal of so-called hydrogen-power -- despite my portraying it positively, in several stories and novels? Because it cannot possibly help us in the near (twenty year) future, as was cogently pointed out recently by Energy Secretary (and Nobel winner) Stephen Chu. "
AP - Italian police on Saturday arrested a Pakistani father and son accused of helping fund and providing logistical support for last year's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, authorities said.
AFP - President Hosni Mubarak warned on Saturday that Cairo will be firm in dealing with those who harm Egyptians, following attacks on its nationals in Algeria and Sudan over a World Cup football match.
AFP - An explosion at a coal mine in northeast China early Saturday killed at least 42 workers, state news agency Xinhua said, citing emergency services.
AP - Iraq's parliament is discussing ways to end a dispute over an election law after a vice president vetoed the bill, throwing national polls slated for January into question.
AP - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says Russia must modernize its economy and reduce its dependence on raw materials exports.
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