Spanish doctors perform face transplant

It's amazing to hear what doctors are able to do these days. Since the partial face transplant a few years ago this type of surgery is developing quickly.

The Spanish patient, who was not identified, now has a completely new face from his hairline down and only one visible scar, which looks like a wrinkle running across his neck, said Barret, who headed the 30-member surgical team.

The man cannot yet speak, eat or smile, but he can see and swallow saliva, the surgeon said. He is expected to be able to eat and breathe on his own in about a week.

"If you look him in the face, you see a normal person," Barret said. "He sits up, he walks in his hospital room and he watches television."

Before the transplant, the 30-year-old patient had had nine surgeries and could only breathe with the help of a ventilator and get nourishment from a feeding tube. He also had problems speaking.

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Stephen Hawking warns that communicating with aliens could be 'too risky'

Sounds goofy but actually quite interesting.

Hawking made the unnerving claim in a new documentary on the Discovery Channel that intelligent alien life-forms almost certainly exist but that communicating with them could be “too risky.”

The 68-year-old scientist said a visit by extraterrestrials to Earth would be like Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas, “which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

He added that the aliens would claim that earth was founded on a Judeo-Alien ethic. Read the rest of this post...

Gallup: GOP is up by 20 points among those 'very enthusiastic about voting'

This isn't good. But, this is what happens when Democrats ignore their base. From Gallup:

Although U.S. registered voters are closely divided in their 2010 congressional election preferences, those who say they are "very enthusiastic about voting" this year show a strong preference for the Republican Party.

Democrats are competitive in the overall generic poll, but are suffering an enthusiasm gap. Look at the numbers:

On Capitol Hill, we've seen -- and will continue to see -- a reluctance to engage in issues that are viewed by our supposed allies as "controversial." That includes the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which has broad support across the spectrum.

Professional Democrats (like White House & Hill staffers and the high paid political consultants) will say things like "we don't want to rile up the Republicans." Um, they're riled up. Really riled up. Democrats need to give their voters a reason to be enthusiastic.

There's time to fix it. But, Democratic leaders at the White House and on Capitol Hill better get moving. Read the rest of this post...

UK zoo captures chimps' response to other chimp's death

The similarities between humans and chimpanzees are amazing.

Pansy, a female who died of old age at Blair Drummond Safari Park at the end of 2008, was one of four chimpanzees being filmed by Anderson's group. When she became ill, vets paid regular visits to give treatment, while her companions – her daughter, a male and another female – looked on from a distance.

When Pansy lay down in a nest that one of the other apes had made, the rest gathered around her and began grooming and caressing her. Shortly before she died, all three crouched down and inspected her face very closely. They then began to shake her gently. "It is difficult to avoid thinking that they were checking for signs of life," said Anderson.

"After a time, it seemed that the chimpanzees arrived at a collective decision that she had gone. Two left immediately, but one, the other adult female, stayed and held her hand," said Anderson. "That evening, her daughter came back and stayed with her mother all night long. She was trying to sleep, but was clearly very disturbed. All three of them were."

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Because we all care what a racist thinks

National Journal:

Sen. Jeff Sessions tells ABC News that no matter who President Obama nominates for the Supreme Court, Republicans will use the hearing to attack Obama, arguing that the president wants a judiciary that supports his political views.

"It's pretty clear to me that President Obama sees judges as allies in an effort to promote an agenda he thinks is best for the country," said Sessions, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in an interview with ABC.

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No more chickens for checkups

This is the Republican running against Harry Reid:

It took around two weeks and a good deal of national ridicule, but Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sue Lowden has finally backed off of her apparent advocacy for a “chickens for checkups” barter policy to bring down health care costs.

In an interview with a local station in Nevada today, Lowden clarified her original comments, claiming she’d been taken out of context. Lowden added she had merely made a “casual statement” designed to describe an ongoing reality, and hadn’t intended to offer a policy prescription.

“They took it way out of context,” Lowden said in the interview, blaming Harry Reid’s campaign tracker for plucking the quote out of an hour-long conversation about multiple topics.

Let's look at that quote again:

In her original quote, Lowden said that “bartering is really good” to “get prices down in a hurry,” urging people to “go ahead and barter with your doctor.”

Lowden subsequently said that in the old days, people traded chickens for health care, adding: “I’m not backing off of that system.”

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Headlines across the country blast GOP for filibustering financial reform

Media Matters grabbed snapshots of a ton of headlines from across the country, and they're brutal. Here are a few:




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The intensity gap still favors the GOP

From Taegan Goddard:

A new Gallup survey finds that Republicans leading Democrats by an astounding 20 points in the generic congressional ballot among those voters most enthusiastic about the 2010 midterm elections, 57% to 37%.

Among all registered voters, Republicans lead by just one point, 46% to 45%.

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Only one Republican member of Congress has spoken out against draconian AZ immigration law

ThinkProgress:

In the U.S. House and Senate, however, Republicans have been far quieter. ThinkProgress rounded up at least five Republicans who have spoken out in favor of the law and three who have been non-committal. The only Republican to condemn it so far is Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Hispanic lawmaker from Florida who is retiring.

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Drama Queen Lindsey Graham

From Jed Lewison at DailyKos:

As you've likely heard, Lindsey Graham is making threats about immigration reform (which he says he supports) and climate change legislation (which he says he also supports).

The weird thing is that Graham's problem isn't about the substance of either piece of legislation. He's peeved over process, saying that unless climate change comes first, he won't have anything to do with either bill.

As Susan pointed out yesterday, Graham's latest process freakout is reminiscent of the fit he threw last month over using reconciliation to fix health care reform. In his words:

"If they do this it is going to poison the well for anything else they would like to achieve this year or years after," Graham warned.

Yet despite Graham's threat, Democrats passed health care reform -- and they used reconciliation to fix it. Graham's response? Within days, he was working with John Kerry and (shudder) Joe Lieberman on climate change legislation. So it seems that he was just making noise to please his base. (And who can blame him? Don't forget, Graham hails from South Carolina...the home state of Jim "Waterloo" DeMint. So it's understandable that he'd want to get headlines bashing Democrats.)

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Glenn Beck says George Bush was a 'progressive'

Raw Story:

At one point in his career, right-wing pundit Glenn Beck happily declared that President George W. Bush and D.C. Comics icon Batman are just alike: both strong and unafraid to take down the bad guys, no matter where they hide.

... Which is why it was a bit odd listening to Beck's Monday radio broadcast, in which he called Bush a "progressive," placing his one-time hero squarely in a political ideology the conspiratorial-minded host calls a "cancer" on America.

Considering this particular television personality's propensity for praising Bush, his rhetorical about-face is truly amazing.

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Big oil fought off new safety rules before rig explosion

Huff Post:

Deepwater Horizon, the giant technically-advanced rig which exploded on April 20 and sank two days later, is leaking an estimated 42,000 gallons per day through a pipe about 5,000 feet below the surface. The spill has spread across 1,800 square miles -- an area larger than Rhode Island -- according to satellite images, oozing its way toward the Louisiana coast and posing a threat to wildlife, including a sperm whale spotted in the oil sheen.

The massive $600 million rig, which holds the record for boring the deepest oil and gas well in the world -- at 35,050 feet - had passed three recent federal inspections, the most recent on April 1, since it moved to its current location in January. The cause of the explosion has not been determined.

Both companies failed to provide a competent crew, failed to properly supervise its employees and failed to provide Rushto with a safe place to work, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The lawsuit also names oil-services giant Halliburton as a defendant, claiming that the company "prior to the explosion, was engaged in cementing operations of the well and well cap and, upon information and belief, improperly and negligently performed these duties, which was a cause of the explosion."

BP and TransOcean have also aggressively opposed new safety regulations proposed last year by a federal agency that oversees offshore drilling -- which were prompted by a study that found many accidents in the industry.

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Rachel Maddow & Jon Stewart on Arizona immigration law

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Nate Silver: Dems forecast to hold Senate in fall elections

This is from a few days ago, but still an interesting analysis from Nate Silver as to how the fall elections will fare for the Senate:

Although national trends continue to move slightly toward the Republicans -- since the start of the year, our senate model's trend estimate has them gaining ground on the Democrats at the rate of about 1 point per month in a typical race -- that momentum was offset this month by recruiting failures in Wisconsin and New York, where Tommy Thompson and George Pataki declined to run. Therefore, our simulation projects Republicans to gain a net of 4.0 Senate seats in this November's elections, a figure unchanged since last month.

The Republicans now have only a 6 percent chance of an outright takeover of the Senate, according to the model.

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Senate investigators looking at other Goldman deals

And the Party of No is surely going to be there in Goldman's hour of need to protect and defend them. Senator Levin has files that go beyond the initial controversial deal. One of the key architects of the initial Abacus deal had referred to the offering as "a product of pure intellectual masturbation." As the country digs itself out of this costly experiment and other similar examples of mathematical theory, it's unimaginable to even dream of circling the wagons for Wall Street but that's what we're seeing from the Republicans. Why do the Republicans hate hard working Americans?

One, called Hudson Mezzanine, was put together in the fall of 2006 expressly as a way to create more short positions for Goldman, the subcommittee claims. The $2 billion deal was one of the first for which Goldman sales staff began to face dubious clients, according to former Goldman employees.

“Here we are selling this, but we think the market is going the other way,” a former Goldman salesman told The New York Times in December.

Hudson, like Goldman’s 25 Abacus deals, was a synthetic collateralized debt obligation, which is a bundle of insurance contracts on mortgage bonds. Like other banks, Goldman turned to synthetic C.D.O.’s to allow it to complete deals faster than the sort of mortgage securities that required actual mortgage bonds. These deals also created a new avenue for Goldman and some of its hedge fund clients to make negative bets on housing.

Goldman also had an unusual and powerful role in the Hudson deal that the Senate committee did not highlight: According to Hudson marketing documents, which were reviewed on Monday by The Times, Goldman was also the liquidation agent in the deal, which is the party that took it apart when it hit trouble.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

If you needed any more evidence that the Republican Party is just another one of Wall Street's toxic assets, you saw it last night when all the Republican Senators voted to filibuster reform. The GOPers in the Senate won't even let the debate start. Yep, they are blocking the debate, not just the underlying bill. Now, how is the GOP's fealty to Wall Street acceptable to the anti-bailout teabaggers? They're all hypocrites.

Obama issued one of his harshest statements to date on the GOP filibuster of the Wall Street reform bill. Never saw anything like that on health care.

The Senate will take another vote on the Wall Street bill today -- and another one tomorrow. Harry Reid is playing hardball.

And, don't forget, the top executives from Goldman Sachs will be testifying before a Senate committee today, too. Wonder if they'll be attending any fundraisers at the RNC after?

The President is heading to Iowa today. He's doing events in three towns, then spending the night in Des Moines. Sounds like a day from Obama's schedule circa 2007.

Shaping up to be an interesting week... Read the rest of this post...

Big Oil and the gas flares of Nigeria

How is it possibly fair that such practices are illegal elsewhere in the world yet uses in Nigeria? As we watch the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it's hard to have very much trust in the oil industry. It's even more difficult to trust those in politics who are so eager to promote that industry, people and environment, be damned.

"This is environmental racism," said Alagoa Morris, an investigator with a local group, Environmental Rights Action, who regularly risks arrest to monitor activities at the heavily guarded oil and gas installations. "What we are asking for is that oil companies should have to meet the same standards in Nigeria that they do operating in their own countries."

The Opolo-Epie plant is set to join at least 100 other flares burning across the swamps, creeks and forests of this oil-producing region, filling the atmosphere with toxins, seeding the clouds with acid rain and polluting the soil.

The gas flares, some of which have been burning constantly since the 1960s, are visible from space. In a country where more than 60 per cent of the people have no reliable electricity supply, the satellite images show the flares burning more brightly than the lights of Nigeria's biggest city, Lagos.

Medical studies have shown the gas burners contribute to an average life expectancy in the Delta region of 43 years. The area also has Nigeria's highest infant mortality rate – 12 per cent of newborns fail to see out their first year.

The process of burning off unwanted "associated gas" brought up when oil is pumped out of the ground has been illegal in Nigeria since 1984.

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Liberal Democrat rips Gordon Brown and the 'convention of old politics'

Just as the world was mystified in 2000 when Bush had fewer popular votes yet more electoral votes, the UK is exposing one of its quirky leftovers from another era. It is possible for Gordon Brown's Labour Party to finish in third (last) place yet still maintain the role of Prime Minister if there is a hung Parliament. The Lib Dem leader (Nick Clegg) is currently running in second place though his numbers are improving. He caused a controversy over the weekend because some thought he would only cooperate with the Conservatives and not Labour. Yesterday, he clarified that Labour was fine, but not a chance working with Gordon Brown. The Guardian:

Clegg, however, has not been deterred from trying to set out the Lib Dem stance. He said: "I think, if Labour do come third in terms of the number of votes cast, then people would find it inexplicable that Gordon Brown himself could carry on as prime minister. As for who I'd work with, I've been very clear – much clearer than David Cameron and Gordon Brown – that I will work with anyone. I will work with a man from the moon, I don't care, with anyone who can deliver the greater fairness that I think people want."

Asked if he could work with the "man from the moon but not Gordon Brown", he said: "I just don't think the British people would accept that he could carry on as prime minister, which is what the convention of old politics dictates when, or rather if, he were to lose the election in such spectacular style."

Lib Dem officials confirmed that Clegg was singling out Brown as the man the country would not tolerate if Labour dropped to third in share of the vote.

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Lindsey Graham, who now says Dems had better not take up immigration reform, was all for immigration reform a month ago

I'm avoiding the overwhelming desire to make a very cheap joke. From Greg Sargent:

Lindsey Graham, as you know, professed himself shocked and angry by the news that Democrats intend to move on immigration reform, prompting him to abruptly yank his support for climate change, potentially killing it.

But back in March, Graham told Obama that he wanted immigration reform to move this year, in order to dissuade the President from moving forward on health care reform. In a March 11 statement on his Senate Web site, Graham described a private meeting with the President on the issue this way.

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Spain's top bullfighter in hospital after goring - fighting for his life

What is the upside to bullfighting and who really wants to pay to see bullfighters gored or bulls slaughtered?

The half-tonne bull caught the famously risk-taking torero in his upper thigh and dug his horn deep by raising his head before flicking the pink-stockinged, sequinned matador up into the air.

Doctors said the horn had penetrated 15cm (6in) into the 34-year-old bullfighter's thigh, damaging veins and arteries and causing a huge loss of blood.

"It is a very deep wound," his manager, Salvador Boix, said. "He has been operated on for three and a half hours. He needed a transfusion of eight litres of blood – the human body normally contains just five litres.

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