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POPSInsurers Fight Public Health Plan
The worst-case scenario from the insurance industry's standpoint? The government mandates individual coverage, but also creates a public plan offering consumers a better deal, and drawing them away from the private companies. When nine of 10 Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee sent a letter to President Obama on June 8 opposing the public-option plan, they argued that such a move could destroy private insurers. "Washington-run programs undermine market-based competition through their ability to impose price controls and shift costs to other purchasers," they wrote. "Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition." The nine signers have received $2.6 million from HMOs/health services and health and accident insurers to their candidate committees and leadership PACs since 1989. Of them, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) ranks 11th among all current members of Congress to get $$.
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POPSGoogle Wave Rolls Out to 100,000 Users Tomorrow The idea is to drag email and IM into real-time—so it's free-wheeling mesh of Twitter, IM, Friendfeed really, any other kind of service presenting semi-real-time stuff in a stream. But in Google Wave, you can share and collaborate on projects, and all of this is mashed together at once, so it might be the ultimate service for people with ADD, or enterprise looking to simulate the feeling of 10 people standing around a desk scattered with a bunch of projects, but you're all able to work on any of them simultaneously while you're also whispering to the cute girl across the table about the new sushi place around the corner. You start a wave with any message or photo or whatever, and you bring people into the discussion, and then they can bring other people in as well (unless you block it or start kicking people out) so it's as public or private as you want it to be.
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POPSUpdate: Brooklyn DA “taking a look” into Brooklyn’s ACORN office. Update: Child-Whoring Pimp Assistance 7 identified; Dick Durbin (D-IL) Roland Burris (D-IL) Robert Casey (D-PA) Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) Patrick Leahy (D-VT) Bernie Sanders (I-VT) Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) The big question will be whether the House follows suit. Nancy Pelosi may not be inclined to let an amendment come to the floor, but James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles may not be done yet, either. A few more of these videos and even Pelosi will have little choice but to slam the door on ACORN. The big test will be whether the Johanns amendment survives a conference committee. This isn’t over yet. Update (AP): Man, this house of cards is toppling fast: Meanwhile, Jerry Schmetterer, director of public information for the Kings County District Attorney’s Office, told FOXNews.com that officials will be “taking a look” into Brooklyn’s ACORN office. “We are going to be taking a look at the situation,” Schmetterer said Monday.
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POPSProtest Reaction According to the Washington DC Fire Department, there were between 60,000 and 70,000 people 106PM. ABC News reporting on television “two million people,” yet the website reads “Thousands March.” 1239PM. Interesting comparison. CNN stream is of the stage, and Fox News is of the crowd. You can follow #912DC on Twitter for updates in the hundreds constantly coming in.
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POPSMilwaukee Selling Water Birthright Cain would be proud of Milwaukee! Finally someone else is selling their birthright! The beer that made Milwaukee famous - you want someone else to own the water you make beer with?
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POPSLiz Cheney Accidentally(?) Lets the Truth Fly Cheney is putting on the “airs of the righteous” and the main stream media is eating it up. In truth, he is scared of being prosecuted and has conducted a campaign to reduce public support for a criminal inquiry. Cheney’s daughter Liz revealed that fear of prosecution is indeed a motivating factor in the former vice president’s current media campaign. Why isn’t G W Bush out there defending his policies? Because Cheney was in charge all along and perhaps because Liz Cheney is being groomed to be a 2012 candidate.
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POPSBig Media Bails on Torture The U.S. media has steered clear in leading a discussion about the moral ramifications of torture, instead asking whether the practices were effective in gaining information from detainees. The U.S. media routinely reports on conflicts without telling us anything of substance about the real issues at the root of the controversy, as evidenced by the media’s response to the release of the Abu Ghraib torture photos. Much of the reporting focused on the photos themselves and the situation of their release, instead of on the acts that the photos documented. Big media has gone soft. It went soft on Bush and it is soft on Obama. Where do their loyalties lie? To advertisers who prove the almighty dollar that keeps them in business. They don't give a crap about the general public losing their constitutional rights, they don't give a damn about how our people are being bled dry by Corporafascist, they only care about having the 'exclusive' on it.
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POPSThe Economist to Open Theme Park Wow! Economics has become so main stream that it's going to be the focus of an amusement park. As someone who studied economics I find this really, really exciting for the profession!
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POPS Turn Twitter Into a TV Channel Twitmatic taps into Twitter's public stream and pulls together a grouping of videos that people have posted in their Tweets. You are not required to enter your Twitter credentials, it merely requires you be signed in to make use of these two promotional tools. Look for future versions of Twitmatic to include more ways to filter the videos that show up, either by keyword, Ffwd content channels, or by the people you follow on Twitter.
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POPSHow to write a modern classic in 20 days Opinions differ as to whether Kerouac really wrote in this way, or whether he did a sneaky bit of rewriting and polishing afterwards. There are also different views on the literary merit of the “spontaneous” approach. Truman Capote, for one, was famously unimpressed. Spontaneous prose was, he declared, “not writing, but typing”. On this subject too, the scroll has a tale to tell. “There are a lot of annotations,” says Kennedy. “He went back over the scroll with pencil, scored things out, and changed names and so forth. You can see these changes before your eyes, which is something that scholars would usually have to go to a library or research institute to do. It’s great that this can be on display, free of charge, to the public.”
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POPSA Deeply Disturbed Man Like many, I watched with a combination of fascination and horror as the outgoing President offered his version of his mea culpa to the American public. Never before have I seen such a concentrated display of lying, self-deception, spinning and hubris. Did I mention lying? Less than a week to go. Good riddance.
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POPSBrand New Master Resell Rights Products Complete resell rights membership with quality ebooks and software. Gain access to an exclusive membership package of Master Resell Rights and Public Label Rights. An income stream with 100% profits.
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POPSSelling Off Our Country This is a bad idea. The cash will soon be gone and states will suffer from sellers remorse from no longer having the revenue stream that these amenities provided. This is a short-sighted, temporary ‘fix’ for cash that will end up costing all of us dearly later. And who is going to suffer the most? Once again your everyday working stiff who is already being squeezed to pay for everything from higher food prices and decreased food safety, increased home maintenance costs and decreased quality of new homes, increased credit costs and decreased job security, increased costs for city services and decreased quality of city services, increased health care costs and decreased quality of healthcare. Plus, we are the ones who have to pay for bailing our economy out of the toilet due to the management practices of incompetent and unscrupulous financial ‘know-it-alls’. This could be a tipping point that will lead to civil unrest that we have been hearing about.
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POPSManna Storehouse Raid - Update This incident took place Dec 1, 2008 but received very little news coverage. The main stream media neglected or refused to run the story but a local paper, the Morning Journal ran with a ‘sanitized’ version. Two points to take away from this story is 1) the manner in which police raided this family home over what amounted to a licensing issue; 2) co-ops should have the right to sell their produce without being licensed; 3) that this is not an isolated event (see article for details). The Ohio and Pennsylvania Departments of Agriculture are taking the stance that they are protecting the public yet no complaint has ever been filed against either of these families who are simply selling their own farm raised whole milk products.
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POPSFinancial Rescue Efforts Miss Mark "Linneman also chided federal officials for instilling panic rather than confidence in the public. He described what he regarded as a steady stream of blunders, ranging from the Bush Administration’s sky-is-falling rhetoric to Congress’ rejection of the original proposal supported by party leaders. As the recession grinds on, the retail sector will take a hit from slower spending by consumers, even the more affluent people on the spectrum who are relatively unaffected. There will be a certain number of stores shuttered by weaker retailers; however, Linneman said, “The real problem is you don’t have many store openings. The hospitality and office sectors will also slow, and distribution centers will hold up fairly well, even though demand will eventually fall off there as well."
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POPS Santa Cruz Ban on Public Assembly Disperses Peacful Drum Circle
The Video stream is poor at the Source. You can download or visit -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhifhRLoGXY for better video steaming. People gather here to eat, to feed others, to communicate and share a feeling of community. It has gone on for well over ten years without trouble with exception to when the police show up and harass musicians and others who gather there under the guise of the 15 minute Parking Lot Panic Law. We stopped it last year. We can do it again. Last year an unknown amount of money was spent on police time spent doing surveillance, harassment and watching people play music and feeding the poor. I would hope the police can find better things to do in our community. Yes drums can be a bit loud. But if we can do video interviews during a loud protest and hear the person, it certainly is not breaking any sound laws. It is one day a week. If you leave people with no place to legally gather, they will not simply leave. They will eventually rebel out of necessity.
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POPSScott Ritter Rips Obama and McCain on War Policy Powerful refutation of McCain and Obama's assessment of Iran and the "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the way it is being portrayed to the public. Democrats in particular should see that Obama and McCain's policies (now) are very close, and not based upon credible threats, much like Iraq. (Ritter is a republican and former Marine and the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq.) If you listen on REAL video or audio his interview begins at the 42:10 mark. This same podcast also includes excerpts from Ron Paul's counter-convention.
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POPSIs 0% Too High for Corporate Taxes? While Repubs fight to lower corp tax rates, the US Govt Accountability Office reports that 2/3 of corporations PAID NO TAXES AT ALL between '98 and '05. Seems like corporations have all the rights of individuals but none of the responsibilities.
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