Study: being a couch potato is bad for your health

Confirming what many have suspected. A little bit of exercise can go a long way.

Women who spend most of their time sitting down when they get home from work may be more likely to get a potentially fatal blood clot on the lungs than those who are more active, according to new research.

The big study, carried out on nurses in the USA, is the first to show that a sedentary lifestyle can lead to pulmonary embolism‚ where a blood clot travels up from the deep veins in the leg and eventually into the lung. The symptoms include chest pain, difficulty breathing and coughing.

It is already known that people who play sport and are physically more active are less likely to suffer pulmonary embolism, but the study published on the website of the British Medical Journal is the first to show that sitting about raises the risk.

Read the rest of this post...

Invoke the 14th Amendment

Katrina vanden Heuvel writing in the Washington Post:

President Obama may find that there is only one course left to avoid a global economic calamity: Invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which says that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” This constitutional option is one that the president alone may exercise.

If the Aug. 2 deadline arrives and no deal has been made, Obama could use a plain reading of that text to conclude — statutory debt ceiling or not — that he is constitutionally required to order the Treasury to continue paying America’s bills. In that sense, this is not just a constitutional option, it is a constitutional obligation, one even the Tea Party will have trouble denying.

Very interesting. I fear, however, that exercising this option would take the kind of gumption the President simply doesn't have, and doesn't like. Read the rest of this post...

Will the religious right give us America’s first gay president?

Well, probably not our first.  But still, it's bizarre that the Christian right is rallying around the one guy in the GOP field, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who's been dogging rumors for years that he's gay.  Then again, they never were the smartest bunch (they totally believed former GOP party chair Ken Mehlman when he told them years ago to ignore the rumors that he was gay - he is gay, and recently came out). And while I'm sure Team Perry will try to spin this as just another "birther"-type conspiracy, as I said years ago during all the speculation about Mehlman, when there's this much chatter about a guy being gay, it often ends up being true. Read the rest of this post...

15 year old gay kid executed by white supremacist classmate for supposedly making flirtatious remark after being bullied

The hateful messages sent by the pedophile-enabling Catholic Church, their vindictive Catholic Charities, the hate groups of the religious right, and the Republican party all play a role in creating and sustaining a culture in this country where gays are considered an "abomination," the word used by the white supremacist who killed this kid.  And what does the Bible say?  That gays shall surely be put to death.

And I know we shouldn't take Leviticus literally, but guess what - lots of crazy people around the country do take it literally, and the Bible as currently translated feeds a climate of hate where white supremacists think they're acting on God's will.  Controversial notion?  Again, the book's own words, on their face, say to kill gay people.  How much more explicit does it have to be for folks who say you should take the Bible literally?

I've written about this before.  Check out what nearly as I can tell, practically ever English language version of the Bible says about gays.  Kill kill kill kill kill. Read the rest of this post...

Koch Brothers foreign subsidiary confesses to making illegal campaign donations

From TPM Muckraker, posted before our national celebration of Freedom:

A Luxembourg-based subsidiary of Koch Industries has admitted to making illegal campaign contributions to political candidates and committees.

INVISTA is a limited liability company involved in the textile manufacturing business that is organized in Luxembourg but headquartered in Kansas. They admitted in a filing with the Federal Election Commission that was disclosed this week that they made 12 contributions totally $26,800 to various political committees between Nov. 2005 and Oct. 2009.

INVESTA voluntarily disclosed the violations to the FEC in Aug. 2010 after an investigation by Koch Companies Public Sector (KCPA), which represents Koch Industries and their affiliates, and outside counsel. Their investigation revealed that the employees involved with making the donation decisions did not know INVESTA was a foreign entity and did not know that foreign corporations could not contribute to state elections like corporations could.

For me, the news (and puzzle) is not that they did it, but that they self-reported it. Note that the action is: (a) pre-Citizens United; (b) inadvertent (because the employees of the foreign company "did not know" they were working for a foreign company); and (c) some Koch internal watchdog entity fessed up.

The fine is "$4,700 for violating the law" under an "conciliation agreement" plus an agreement get the money returned. The effect is to appear to confirm the foreign donations ban, but I'm wondering why KCPA came forward.

But something's going on that's not being reported. Why did they fess up? Businesses don't usually fess up about anything. They always make the feds prove it, even for minor stuff like perfectly clean sawdust in milk.

Yet on this story, there's nothing but silence on that aspect. For instance, here's the same tale from HuffPost (my emphasis):

INVISTA's contributions were disclosed to the FEC after lawyers for Koch Industries discovered the illegal contributions and relayed the information to the FEC for review.

All very voluntary, and no digging for causes.

If I'm managing this strategically from atop the Olympian clouds at Koch Brothers Central, I'd work the response more cleverly into my geo-political grand schemata. After all, I want all election contribution restrictions overturned, don't I. So is this minor event a bit of hyper-clever mis-direction by the Koch Olympians, or a mistake by a corporate underling working in a sub-office of a subsidiary (in this case, the Koch internal watchdog group)?

Could be either, but I suspect that this was handled too quickly and at too low a level for Olympian eyeballs, by relatively honest people who were hired to do non-geo-political wrangling — i.e., keeping the numerous acquired toilet-paper and textile companies in that giant Kochish octopus on the right side of basic and mundane law.

Pushing the Citizens United envelope is not mundane, however. So if I'm right, you may not see that kind of compliant response again. But in any case, expect a challenge to the foreign corp limitation from somewhere. After all, the Chinese would love a piece of the purchase-a-politico game, assuming they don't already have their own set of retainers under contract. It's going to happen.

But for now, kudos to Koch lower-downs for (inadvertently?) doing the right thing. Hope you have a backup plan in case the bosses aren't pleased.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Hard addicts drop by half after decriminalization of drugs in Portugal

AFP:

The number of addicts considered "problematic" -- those who repeatedly use "hard" drugs and intravenous users -- had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said....

"This development can not only be attributed to decriminalisation but to a confluence of treatment and risk reduction policies."

Read the rest of this post...

David Brooks: Dems offering GOP "deal of the century" on budget; GOP not "normal"

The conservatives are already bragging about the Democrats' concession on the budget. Here's David Brooks in the NYT:

Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases.

On the good side, Brooks thinks the GOP is no longer a "normal" party, and he says the conservative Republicans running the party "have no sense of moral decency." Brooks worries that the public will see that the Democrats bent over backwards in giving away the house during the budget talks, while the Republicans simply said "no."

Perhaps.

But that will take some convincing. And if we've learned anything, it's that Republicans can sell practically any lie, while Democrats can't sell nearly any truth. Getting the public to accept that the Dems tried and the Republicans didn't will take a sales job that I'm not convinced the Democratic party is up for. They don't know PR very well. And worse, don't seem to recognize that fact (and thus fix it by hiring, and empowering, people who do). That doesn't mean Dems won't win this battle - they might. But it's more likely the President will see an impasse, and cave some more until a deal is reached.

And the oddest party, that's when the President will point to polls showing the public - which doesn't have a clue what any of these deals really do - "approves" of the deal and gives him credit for it. All the while, lots of vital government services will be quietly phased out over the next 12 years, fulfilling a lifelong dream of the GOP. But we'll say we won. Because winning is no longer based on the substance of a deal. Instead, it's based on any deal having been reached, regardless of the details, so long as the polls approve. Read the rest of this post...

A Bill Clinton trial balloon on a temporary budget deal?

And not a very welcome trial balloon at that:

If Republicans maintain their opposition to revenue increases, [Bill] Clinton said, Obama should pursue a short-term deal to extend the debt ceiling based on spending cuts both sides have already accepted in the negotiations between the administration and Congressional leaders from both parties.

So if the GOP refuses to give us anything, we should give them something for free, just make it smaller. And so on, and so on, and so on...

How is this winning? Strike that. How is this not losing?

So let's just keep cutting spending in the near terms, instead of pushing for another stimulus - i.e., let's do what the GOP wants instead of what the country needs - guaranteeing that economic growth will slow some more, and unemployment might even increase some more, in the months before the 2012 elections, thus risking a GOP win in the White House and the Senate.

But it will look like the President is a great conciliator.  I'm sure that will be great comfort when he's retired back in Chicago in 2013 and the Republican Congress along with the Republican White House repeals health care reform. Read the rest of this post...

Frank Rich: Obama’s failure to take on Wall Street may cost him re-election

From Frank Rich writing in NY Magazine.

As good times roar back for corporate America, it’s bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash.... But what’s most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.

The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind. No good deed he’s done for Wall Street has gone unpunished. He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it? All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street”—an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as “very savvy businessmen.”

Obama can win reelection without carrying 10021 or Greenwich in any case. The bigger political problem is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him. Given Obama’s humble background, his history as a mostly liberal Democrat, and his famous résumé as a community organizer, this would also seem a reach. But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

He stocked his administration with brilliant personnel linked to the bubble: liberals, and especially Ivy League liberals. Nearly three years on, they have taken a toll both on the White House’s image and its policies. Obama arrives at his reelection campaign not merely with a weak performance on Wall Street crime enforcement and reform but also with a scattershot record (at best) of focusing on the main concern of Main Street: joblessness. One is a consequence of the other. His failure to push back against the financial sector, sparing it any responsibility for the economy it tanked, empowered it to roll over his agenda with its own. He has come across as favoring the financial elite over the stranded middle class even if, in his heart of hearts, he does not.

The ultimate indignity, though, was a Washington Post / ABC News poll showing Obama in a dead heat with Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney! If any belief unites our polarized nation, it’s the conviction that Romney is the most transparent phony in either party, no matter how much he’s now deaccessioning hair products. It’s also been a Beltway truism that a Mormon can’t win the Republican nomination, let alone a Massachusetts governor who devised the prototype for “ObamaCare.” But that political calculus changed overnight. That this poseur could so quickly gain traction, even if evanescently, should alarm Obama.

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Read the rest of this post...

GOP chips away at financial reform

Talk about being completely owned by Wall Street. The Democrats are no strangers to licking the boots of Wall Street but they did promote some level of action to fix the problems that Washington caused. The GOP on the other hand can't even tolerate superficial reform. Why do the Republicans hate the middle class and hate America? Whose side are they on?

Days ago, one Republican-run House committee approved bills diluting parts of the law requiring reports on corporate salaries and exempting some investment advisers from registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another House panel voted to slice $200 million from Obama's $1.4 billion budget request for the SEC, which has a major enforcement role.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are continuing a procedural blockade that has helped prevent Obama from putting Elizabeth Warren or anyone else in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opens its doors in two weeks.

The law hurts "the formation of capital, the cost of capital and access to capital, and you can't have capitalism without capital," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, a leader of the House Financial Services Committee. "So Republicans in the House will be examining each and every one of the 2,000-plus pages" of the law, which he called "a job creator's nightmare."

Ahh, if nitwits like Hensarling want to talk about capitalism, they should understand that in a capitalist world, gamblers who fail, fail. Wall Street should have imploded and been left without bailouts and higher-than-ever pay. But of course, the US doesn't have capitalism. It has socialism for the richest of the rich who continue to wage class warfare against the rest of the country. Another feature of capitalism would be negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma but again, the GOP is against capitalism. What a bunch of liars. Read the rest of this post...

Romney’s flip flopping on economic message now happens "within one sentence"

Mitt is apparently the GOP's frontrunner. He's a particularly loathsome character who has flipped and flopped on issues over the past decade. But even for Mitt, this is a new low. As the Los Angeles Times reports, Mitt changed his message "within one sentence":

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has struggled to craft a consistent economic message in recent weeks — first blaming President Obama for driving the country deeper into recession and then backing off that charge during a visit to Pennsylvania. On Monday in southern New Hampshire, he appeared to offer those conflicting messages within one sentence.

The former Massachusetts governor's remarks about the economy came at the end of a Fourth of July parade in Amherst, a heavily Republican town southwest of Manchester, during a pep talk with volunteers. He asked them to keep working for him all the way through New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary next year.

"Don't forget what this is all about," he told the group that crowded around him after he stepped onto a wooden replica of a soapbox in the town green. "We love this country; it's the greatest country in the history of the Earth, and we face extraordinary challenges right now. Our president has failed us.

"The recession is deeper because of our president; it's seen an anemic recovery because of our president. The people who want the status quo can vote for him, but people who want real change and jobs for Americans are going to vote for us."

Those statements — that the president had driven the economy deeper into recession but also that an "anemic" recovery had occurred — not only seemed to be contradictory, but also at odds with what Romney has previously argued.

And, lest we forget, Mitt's strength is supposed to be the economy. Shouldn't surprise anyone, really. The GOPers destroyed the economy in 2008. They're on the verge of pushing us over the edge with the debt ceiling. It's no wonder their frontrunner has no economic maessage. That whole party is bereft of any sane economic thinking (which is why no one in the White House or Treasury Department should take any GOP advice on the economy. They're willing to destroy it again if it means political gain.) Read the rest of this post...

Local debt in China may be worse than reported, could lead to social unrest

It should be noted that the communist China has consistently lied about numbers over the years. As bad as Moody's may be, even their numbers may be too conservative. In the past this led to famine but this time it could lead to social unrest.

China's local government debt burden may be 3.5 trillion yuan ($540 billion) larger than auditors estimated, putting banks on the hook for deeper losses that could threaten their credit ratings, Moody's said on Tuesday.

Addressing the estimate by China's state auditor that its local governments have chalked up 10.7 trillion yuan of debt, Moody's said it found more potential loans after accounting for discrepencies in figures given by various Chinese authorities.

"The potential scale of the problem loans at Chinese banks may be closer to its stress case than its base case," Moody's said in a statement.

Read the rest of this post...

Rupert Murdoch's UK paper accused of hacking into missing girls phone

Hacking into the phones of politicians and celebrities is bad enough but a murdered girl? What a bunch of sick people.

But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly's voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.

The Dowler family then granted an exclusive interview to the News of the World in which they talked about their hope, quite unaware that it had been falsely kindled by the newspaper's own intervention. Sally Dowler told the paper: "If Milly walked through the door, I don't think we'd be able to speak. We'd just weep tears of joy and give her a great big hug."

The deletion of the messages also caused difficulties for the police by confusing the picture when they had few leads to pursue. It also potentially destroyed valuable evidence.

Read the rest of this post...

Australia proposes carbon tax

The reaction has been about what one would expect in the US these days, which is of course, not a good thing. Standing idle and doing nothing while the weather patterns change is obviously much easier to do. The cleanup and devastation from climate change isn't so great but at least they won't have to pay new taxes. The Guardian:

The levy was proposed by Gillard, who needed support from Greens in a hung parliament. But the plan has divided Australia like no other issue of recent years.

An opinion poll on Tuesday 28 June showed Gillard's disapproval rating at 62%. Another poll suggested barely one in four Australians would vote for her, making her government the most unpopular in 40 years.

Cities such as Wollongong have led the assault, as blue collar voters - who have done well on the back of the mining boom - desert the prime minister in droves.

Read the rest of this post...