jamie's blog

This morning on MSNBC Erin Burnett was talking about the FCC releasing their plan this week to increase the nation’s broadband speeds and penetration. During the segment she pointed to a new report stating that we are #18 when it comes to internet speed. Romania even beats us out.

Is it any wonder that we are struggling in the 21st century economy when we are still stuck with 20th century technology? To exemplify this, take a look at the U.K.:

The Tory party has once again pledged super-fast broadband, and has gone a step further by stating that if the party wins the general election it will provide Britain with the fastest broadband in Europe.

Broadband speeds have become a big part of the promises that the various political parties have been making in a bid to win votes in the up and coming general election. The Labour government has already put its own plans in place to improve broadband access and speeds, and recently the Conservative party also promised to ensure that Britain would get faster broadband speeds and better access.

When do we hear our politicians campaign on increasing internet speeds? Even during the 2008 campaign it was never really that big of an issue. True a lot of that had to do with a Republican candidate who didn’t even know how to open an email, but still.

If the U.S. wants to really compete we have to bring the backbone of the 21st century economy up to par in our nation. The U.S. was instrumental in bringing the world into the technological age. Now we seem to be ignoring it.

So here we are, the final week for the health care reform push. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens today. I got a feeling the signals will be mixed all the way up to the final vote this weekend. From one minute to the next we will hear “they have the votes”, “they don’t have the votes”.

A lot of Democrats in the House have a problem with trusting the Senate to do the right thing later on, and I can’t blame them one bit. On the other hand, a lot of the pro-life Democrats who were going to vote against the bill seem to be switching now. That really adds to the complication of the whip count.

So what do you think the final outcome will be? I really have no idea at this point.

Anita Dunn is on the round table on This Week. When asked about the health care bill she decided to use the Medicare-D drug supplemental as an example by saying “well people didn’t like that at first either”.

Guess what Anita? They still don’t like it! The Medicare-D program has left seniors with these new evils like doughnut holes, where they have to pay out hundreds and thousands out of pocket. They are also subject to predatory insurance salesmen now, pushing them to buy their program only to find that later on in the year they change the formulary, removing needed drugs from the list of what they will buy, and now that person is stuck with them until the end of the year.

And let’s not forget the implementation of the program. Thousands of seniors around the country were unable to get their medication. It was a cluster fuck to put it nicely.

No Anita – don’t use Medicare-D as an example to push for healthcare reform. You are going to do far more harm than good.

Or as I like to call him – Pope Been A Dick:

A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.

The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

And as Pam Spaulding points out, this isn’t the only trouble for the asshole:

The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict's handling of abuse claims both when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977-1982 and then the prefect of the Vatican office that deals with such crimes - a position he held until his 2005 election as pope.

And they may lead to further questions about what the pontiff knew about the scope of abuse in his native Germany, when he knew it and what he did about it during his tenure in Munich and quarter-century term at the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

the Munich archdiocese admitted that it had allowed a priest suspected of having abused a child to return to pastoral work in the 1980s, while Benedict was archbishop. It stressed that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger didn't know about the transfer and that it had been decided by a lower-ranking official.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement late Friday noting that the Munich vicar-general who approved the priest's transfer had taken "full responsibility" for the decision, seeking to remove any question about the pontiff's potential responsibility as archbishop at the time.

Victims' advocates weren't persuaded.

"We find it extraordinarily hard to believe that Ratzinger didn't reassign the predator, or know about the reassignment," said Barbara Blaine, president and founder of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

I would love to see history be made here – someone go from Pope to prison.

One of the bigger wingnut bloggers, Dan Riehl, is out using the horrible accident that Harry Reid’s family was in to push the lie of “death panels”:

Come on, Harry - do your civic duty. The nation's broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don't bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?

And I sit here thinking of how the wingnuts like Malkin go off on hissy fits everytime some anonymous commenter posts on a progressive blog saying they wish Cheney’s last heart attack would have done him in, or that Rush would have died in the hospital. These people aren’t just hypocrites, they are sick and twisted assholes.

No – it isn’t a bad thing. Quiet the contrary, this is excellent news. Part of the Recovery Act, passed last year, is slated to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure.

This is something desperately needed in our country so that we can compete in the 21st century economy. It should be considered a crime that we still have portions of our country that have no access to broadband internet, and those that do usually end up paying inflated prices by the monopoly that is the telecom industry. Just this week, one member of the FCC lashed out at the industry:

Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn on Wednesday indirectly hammered Comcast for recently raising its broadband prices.
As Cyburn and other FCC commissioners discussed broadband affordability at a digital literacy summit on Tuesday, Comcast instituted a $2 rate increase on its lowest-tier customers.

That prompted Clyburn to issue a statement rebuking Internet service providers, in general, for their recent rate hikes -- though the commissioner's comments seemed indirectly targeted at Comcast.

Sadly this is like that song that’s stuck in your head – you hear it over and over again. The telecom companies have become much like the health insurance companies. They get to operate as monopolies and can do whatever they want with the prices, leaving consumers stuck with them.

This might all be coming to an end though, and here’s how you can help. The FCC has set up a website where they are asking citizens to have their computer do a simple test to check your connection speeds. You do have to give your address, but that’s just so they know what areas the tests are coming from. You can do the test here.

But what if you don’t have broadband? Well the FCC isn’t forgetting about you either. If you live in one of these ‘dead zones’ then you can either fill out a report online or call the FCC at 1-888-CALL-FCC.

This is the product of having a 21st century President. We really need to catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to broadband penetration, speeds and prices. Hopefully we will have that very soon.

Morning Joe is still stuck on Massa. Really, it appears that Joe has some inner regret for not being one of Massa’s targets, but something they have been saying has really got me going. All morning they have been comparing Eric Massa to Mark Foley.

Massa is accused of making sexual advances towards male staffers – people over the age of 18. Yes it is wrong, but it is something that is very common in any workplace.

Mark Foley, well this guy was sending sexually implicit emails to House Paige’s. These are minors – children under the age of 18. They are sent to Capital Hill to learn from the leaders of our country, and while there they are considered wards of the House. Foley was supposed to be a mentor to these children, not a predator.

It amazes me that a talent on a major network news channel is so blinded by partisanship that he can’t make a distinction between the two. Either Joe is trying to make Massa’s case out to be much worse than it is, or he is trying to diminish the severity of what Foley did. If the reason falls in the later, then Scarborough should be really ashamed. There is no excuse for that and MSNBC should yank Scarborough for something so disgusting. This is, after all, the network that brought us Chris Hanson’s “To Catch A Predator”.

Yesterday Patrick Kennedy gave this fire speech on the House floor talking about the media’s attention deficit disorder, or how they can only focus on one story at a time:

Apparently the truth really hurts and it has put Candy Crowley on the defensive. Yesterday she suggested that Kennedy only did this to get rid of the Massa story:

No Candy – you are the problem. If you actually believe that this was some sort of staged performance, then you are more of a moron than I ever thought. Don’t worry though because you aren’t alone. The media is full of blowhards like you that can’t realize the reason your industry is suffering to bad is because it’s full of morons. You guys have destroyed the 4th estate, which in turn has helped destroy this country. Feel proud of yourself as there will be chapters about your failures written in the history books.

This whole “seniority” thing in the Senate has always been a bunch of garbage and helped contribute to the “good ole’ boys” club mentality that surrounds the chamber. Now it looks like it could be coming to an end:

During a question-and-answer session with progressive media, video blogger Mike Stark asked lawmakers why the Democratic caucus hasn't yanked Sen. Blanche Lincoln's chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee, considering her opposition to Democratic legislative efforts. In Arkansas, her gavel is a top selling point as she battles a progressive primary challenge.

"We're going to elect committee chairs next year," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). "The current chairs that are sitting there now understand that we'll be electing chairs next year," he added, saying the idea had been cleared with Senate leadership.

Under current rules, members of the caucus can weigh in by objecting to an overall Senate organizing resolution, but don't have an up-or-down vote on each chair.

That’s exactly how it should be. Take Lieberman as an example. The only reason he is still a Democrat is so that he can keep his seniority and have his Homeland Security chairmanship. It doesn’t matter if Jack Bauer himself became a senator, Lieberman would still be chair because of his seniority.

It’s practices like this that have made the Senate a laughing stock of the free world. I’m glad to see talk of ending it. If these people really think they should chair committees, then let them fight for it. It’s time for our senators to prove their worth.

This is so cool:

IBM researchers on Tuesday said they have discovered a way to make Earth-friendly plastic from plants that could replace petroleum-based products tough on the environment.

The breakthrough promises biodegradable plastics made in a way that saves on energy, according to Chandrasekhar "Spike" Narayan, a manager of science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center in Northern California.

Almaden and Stanford University researchers said the discovery could herald an era of sustainability for a plastics industry rife with seemingly eternal products notorious for cramming landfills and littering the planet.

"This discovery and new approach using organic catalysts could lead to well-defined, biodegradable molecules made from renewable resources in an environmentally responsible way," IBM said in a release.

Imagine how much our petroleum usage will decrease if it wasn’t needed for plastic. Think of how much less space will be wasted in landfills by the never-degrading current plastics.

But the best part is who discovered this – IBM. There’s a lot less chance of the oil industry trying to silence them and hide the discovery than if it was some little lab no one ever really heard of. That means we stand a chance to really see this become a reality.

Take a look at this story on CNN:

Barely a month in office, Sen. Scott Brown, R-Massachusetts, is putting some muscle behind his independent image by twice voting against his own party and questioning the use of the filibuster.

Brown took to the Senate floor Tuesday to announce he would vote for cloture, or to end a Republican filibuster, on a bill extending unemployment benefits and tax credits. This, despite the fact he opposes the bill and technically the filibuster helped his cause.

"I have very serious concerns about the overall cost of the bill," Brown told the chamber, "but my vote for cloture signals that I believe we need to keep the process moving." He also said, "there has been a week of debate and allowing this bill to receive an up-and-down vote, would be a step, I feel, in the right direction."

Nothing really bad in there, but then take a look at this part:

It is rare for a senator to vote for cloture, thus advancing a bill, while opposing the bill itself. Votes on filibusters are often defacto decisions on the content of the proposal.

Rare? Yes if we are talking about the past 2 years, but not when you look at the overall history of the Senate. Without saying it, the reporter is talking about a filibuster – a practice that’s use has risen exponentially these past couple of years. Before that it was common for Senators to allow a bill to proceed to a final vote, even if they disagreed with it. It’s called majority rule and something that is very common. Perhaps CNN should send their reporters back to 3rd grade social studies so that they can have a bit of a clue of how our government is supposed to work.

The biggest reason I have been very pessimistic about the possibility of us seeing health care reform this year is because of the problems in the Senate. I know a lot of people have maintained that we already have a bill that passed the Senate, but we do have to remember that our Congress is bi-camel, composed of two houses with equal power. That’s where our problem lies. The House, that actually functions in a democratic nature 99% of the time is really leery of putting trust into the broken Senate. That’s causing things like this:

Dem Rep Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who voted for the House health bill last time, tells his local WLUK-TV that he doesn’t trust the Senate to fix its bill via reconciliation and suggests he’s leaning against:

“I have made the case to the speaker and also to the White House that we should take small pieces, small bites,” Kagen said. “In the practice of medicine, I can’t give a child a big pill. What do we do? We cut it up into pieces. Let’s find things we can agree on.”

Honestly, if I was in Kagen’s shoes I would probably say the same thing. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I really dislike the Senate bill, but if it could be fixed then I would be happy with it. Sadly though, with the current state of the Senate and it’s lack of leadership, how can anyone trust them to fix something so important?

I was just reading this article in Politico talking about how Eric Massa is now a conservative media hero. Yeah – it seems like red meat to them. A Democrat claiming that he is being pushed out of Congress by his own party for not supporting their agenda. But hey – Massa lasted 6 years in the Democratic Party! Remember – he was a Republican until 2004. But that isn’t what has got me going.

Politico did a recap of what Massa said occurred on the night that lead to the sexual harassment charge:

“I danced with the bride, and I danced with the bridesmaid. Absolutely nothing occurred,” Massa recounted. “I said goodnight to the bridesmaid. I sat down at the table where my whole staff was — all of them, by the way, bachelors. One of them looked at me and — as they would do after, I don’t know, 15 gin and tonics and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne — a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid. His points were clear, and his words were far more colorful than that.

“And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me, and I said, ‘What I really ought to be doing is fracking you,’ and then tousled the guy’s hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where I shouldn’t be there.”

First thing that really sticks out at me if 15 gin and tonics, plus an unknown amount of champagne. I used to be a bartender and if someone had 15 gin and tonics they would be beyond that point of being cut off, and that’s without the added little boost of the bubbly.

How many times have we heard Republicans say that health care reform will lead us to “socialized medicine”? How many times have they used Canada as an example of what we don’t want to be? Well check this out:

Sarah Palin's family use to "hustle" across the Canadian border to get healthcare, the former Alaska Governor said
this weekend.

In a speech in Calgary, Palin called it "ironic" that while growing up in a small Alaskan town near the Canadian border, her family used to sneak across to take advantage of the Canadian healthcare system.

"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," she said, according to Medicine Hat News (via Dave Weigel.) "And I think now, isn't that ironic."

Yup – the queen of the GOP used to use that horrible Canadian medical system. She has brought an entirely new meaning to the word hypocrite.

One of the long time corner stones of the Republican Party has been trying to rid ourselves of any government regulation. They believe that people and business should be able to regulate themselves. Here’s an example of what that system produces:

The market concentration for health insurance is so monopolized in some areas that insurance companies are willing to raise prices and lose customers in an effort to improve their bottom line, a leading insurance broker told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday.

In a conference call organized by Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, Steve Lewis, a highly regarded broker at the world's third largest insurance broker, Willis, painted a picture of the health insurance market in which employers seem likely to be priced out of coverage.

Because they have no real rules/regulations to follow, the insurance companies can do this and get away with it. It will lead to more uninsured Americans, who now have to use the emergency room as their doctor’s office, which increases wait times and leaves more Americans picking up the expenses. Yet when we talk about health care reform, the Republicans constantly say “let them regulate themselves”. Well – here is what it gets you.

But the examples don’t stop there. Let’s take another real life example – one that has happened in our neck of the world.

This year we have seen two serious earthquakes rock our hemisphere. The Haiti earthquake has claimed nearly 1/4 million lives. Last weeks earthquake in Chile, which was 500 times more powerful than the one in Haiti, has claimed less than 300 lives.

Wait! How can an earthquake that is about 500 times less in power claim almost 1,000 times more lives? Well the answer is simple.

Haiti is a Republican Mecca – a nation with no pesky regulations. That means no rules for people, like construction workers, to follow. Compare that to Chile, a nation accredited with being one of the toughest on building regulations, and you quickly see how the big GOP enemy of regulation lead to a lot of lives being saved.

The examples don’t just stop there. How about mining deaths? Hearing about countless people dying in mines is common news coming out of China, but we rarely hear it here. Why? Because we have regulations. And the adverse effect of that could be seen in 2006 during the Sago mine collapse, when Bush decided to let one of the regulatees (to make up a new work) play regulator:

In 1997, as a top executive of a Utah mining company, David Lauriski proposed a measure that could allow some operators to let coal-dust levels rise substantially in mines. The plan went nowhere in the government.

Last year, it found enthusiastic backing from one government official - Mr. Lauriski himself. Now head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, he revived the proposal despite objections by union officials and health experts that it could put miners at greater risk of black-lung disease....

Safety and environmental regulations often shift with control of the White House, but the Bush administration's approach to coal mining has been a particularly potent example of the blend of politics and policy.

This hatred of government regulation by the GOP lead to 12 lives being lost.

Regulations are a necessary evil – one that keeps us safe and helps our capitalistic system thrive. If you still don’t buy it, then consider this when you are out at the store this weekend. With no government regulation, that store wouldn’t have things like fire protection systems. Say some unregulated electrical work happened and now sparks a big fire. When they built the store they decided to only make the exits at the very front and the loading dock. Why should they pay for more doors when no one makes them? Now you have a death box, complete with people getting trampled, and you are stuck in the middle of it.

Does it sound far fetched? Tell that to the families of the 165 people who died in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in 1977. That’s a fire that happened very close to me, and being a former firefighter and fire inspector, one I studied a lot. Every contributing factor in that horrible tragedy can be attributed to a lack of regulations.

So the next time we hear some Republican or tea bagger whine and complain about “government regulation”, remind them of these facts. These aren’t hypothetical points, but rather real life situations in which we have seen the deadly outcomes.  If they still don’t buy it, then ask yourself if this is a person you really consider mentally fit to be a decision maker in our nation.