Judge orders woman to have hysterectomy

It's a bit of a complicated story, and I'm not entirely sure which way I come down on this. You?

L.K.'s appeal says she is a deeply religious woman who wants children and that she objected to the hysterectomy on both grounds, the Missoulian reported Sunday.

After L.K.'s cancer diagnosis, Dr. Valerie Knutsen sent a letter to the Missoula County attorney's office in September with concerns about L.K.'s ability to make medical decisions. A nurse sent similar letters in September and October. A petition to appoint a temporary medical guardian was filed in November. On Feb. 11, the temporary medical guardian signed a consent form for L.K. to have the radical hysterectomy. The surgery was scheduled for March 3.

During a status hearing on March 1, a psychiatrist from the Montana State Hospital testified that the woman was having religious delusions that God had cured her and that those delusions prevented her from making fully informed decisions about her medical care.

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Obama restarts Gitmo trials

AP:

President Barack Obama approved Monday the resumption of military trials for detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ending a two-year ban.

It was the latest acknowledgement that the detention facility Obama had vowed to shut down within a year of taking office will remain open for some time to come. But even while announcing a resumption of military commission trials, Obama reaffirmed his support for trying terror suspects in U.S. federal courts - something that's met vehement resistance on Capitol Hill.

Oddly, AP quotes a Republican defending the trials, but no one expressing any concern at all on the other side. Sigh. Read the rest of this post...

Far too realistic human-like robot trying to smile (not a joke)

Yeah, we're all dead.


(Via Slog, they have more videos.) Read the rest of this post...

NH GOP wants to take vote away from college kids since they 'vote liberal'

Change that state motto to "Live Soviet or die." Seriously, why do Republicans even feel safe saying something this horrifically un-American? It's a real sign of how extreme the party leadership has become. From the Wash Post:

New Hampshire's new Republican state House speaker is pretty clear about what he thinks of college kids and how they vote. They're "foolish," Speaker William O'Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group.

"Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," he added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students lack "life experience," and "they just vote their feelings."

New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state - and effectively keep some from voting at all.

And there's video! The sound is soft, but you can hear him. The good stuff is about a minute in, give or take.

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Will the Middle East and North Africa follow the Latin American model for democracy?

An interesting read on Al Jazeera's site about how Brazil and other Latin American countries moved from military dictatorships to democracy. The opportunity for a positive transformation exists and it would benefit everyone if the UN and the democracies of the world assisted during this process. Al Jazeera:

Since becoming democratic, 30 million Brazilians have joined the middle class, with 30 million more leaving abject poverty for less grinding poverty, the former foreign minister said. But the country still has a long to go if the goal is to eliminate vast income disparities.

Moves towards democracy in Brazil did not happen overnight; they transpired slowly throughout the 1980s. And religious institutions played a key part in that transition, said Matthew Flynn, a sociology lecturer and Brazil specialist at the University of Texas. "I'd imagine that religious institutions will play a pretty prominent role in [any transition] in the Middle East," Flynn said.

The Workers Party (PT), which currently holds power, was formed in 1978 by labour agitators in the country’s industrial heart-land, religious activists from the Catholic Church and human rights groups. "They [the PT] were pretty active in forcing elections, along with other independent parties," Flynn said.

Dilma Rouseff, Brazil’s current president and the country’s first female leader, began her political career as a leftist guerrilla, fighting the military dictatorship.

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Krugman: The answer to new American jobs isn't education, it's unions

Yes, the headline is correct. In this modern world, the solution to a better job in the U.S. is not education, and it's not going to be education for a while to come.

The reason is rather simple, and Krugman lays it out rather well:

The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers. ... As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

If you think about computers and how they work, says the Professor (and many of us do just that for a living), this trend makes perfect sense. Computers follow "explicit rules". Any mental worker whose activity can be performed by a rule-follower can be replaced by a rules-based thinking machine. In addition, any mental worker who can "work from home" can be replaced by a machine that works from a different home — say, Bangalore or Manila.

In other words, if all you do is sweep up, you're safe. You can have all the underpaid work you can use in a 24-hour day.

And at the other end, if you all you do is sweep up the profits, you're equally good to go — no machine can appreciate the greens of St. Andrews like a CEO with an expense account. You and your political retainers are irreplaceable.

The folks in the middle, on the other hand, had better start polishing those local-only service skills:

Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research [pdf] by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

The Professor's answer is not more education, but ... more unions:

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen. [emphasis added]

Talking about education is not going to cut it. Now if someone showed us real change, with real bargaining power for real workers, and then followed through — that person might actually acquire a following.

Wonder where we can find that person.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Matt Damon on Obama: 'I think he's rolled over to Wall Street completely'

This isn't a story about Matt Damon. It's not even a story about Barack Obama. It's a story about us, and about the year-long ad campaign known as the 2008 election:

Few of Barack Obama's celebrity supporters at the 2008 US presidential election were as committed to his cause as the Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon. Rather than merely support Mr Obama in an online video, Damon, one of Hollywood's highest-profile liberal activists, campaigned for the Democratic nominee in Florida. Not content with that, he provided one of the most cutting insults of the campaign when he described the Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin as "really terrifying... like something out of a bad Disney movie".

What happened to Damon has happened all over the country:

Damon, 40, star of the Bourne spy trilogy and two new films, The Adjustment Bureau and True Grit, is scrupulously polite and mild-mannered when we meet in a Manhattan hotel. But laying bare his disenchantment with the Obama administration, he doesn't hide how let down he feels. President Obama's record on the economy particularly rankles. "I think he's rolled over to Wall Street completely. The economy has huge problems. We still have all these banks that are too big to fail. They're bigger and making more money than ever. Unemployment at 10 per cent? It's terrible." ... He is upset that Mr Obama, who promised to "spread the wealth around", has extended the Bush tax cuts and that the inequality gap has widened.

"They had a chance that they don't have any more to stand up for things," he says. "They've probably squandered that at this point. They'll probably just make whatever deals they can to try to get elected again."

I really meant it that this isn't about Obama, but about us. I think Damon speaks for many. So, thinking theoretically about the 2012 election, how does a left-leaning (or left-appearing) candidate re-engage this many disillusioned voters?

If the race is not tight, a no-brainer, that's probably not a problem. But even John McCain gave Obama a run, and the 53-46 margin, though comfortable, was not a blowout.

What if Obama seriously missteps twixt here and there? I don't think he can reach back into his pocket and pull out yet more legions of starry-eyed newborn voters. (Our thoughts on the starry-eyed newborns are here.)

An interesting side-detail about Damon:

[T]he most extraordinary thing about him in person is how ordinary he is. He brushes aside an attempt by a publicist to serve him coffee, insisting on pouring it himself. Instead of a celebrity actress or model spouse, he is married to Luciana Barroso whom he met while she was bartending in Miami. They live in New York with their four children.

How refreshing, for a change.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Glenn Beck has lost over 1/3 of his audience on Fox

Though he had a lot of viewers to start with, so he's still powerful. Also, as the article notes, he has an interesting power base aside from his show on FOX, what with his radio show, books and public appearances. Still, it's nice to see that the paranoid schizophrenic isn't ten feet tall.

NYT:

Mr. Beck, a conservative Jeremiah and talk-radio phenomenon, burst into television prominence in 2009 by taking the forsaken 5 p.m. slot on Fox News and turning it into a juggernaut. A conjurer of conspiracies who spotted sedition everywhere he looked, Mr. Beck struck a big chord and ended up on the cover of Time magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and held rallies all over the country that were mobbed with acolytes. He achieved unheard-of ratings, swamped the competition and at times seemed to threaten the dominion of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity at Fox.

But a funny thing happened on the way from the revolution. Since last August, when he summoned more than 100,000 followers to the Washington mall for the “Restoring Honor” rally, Mr. Beck has lost over a third of his audience on Fox — a greater percentage drop than other hosts at Fox. True, he fell from the great heights of the health care debate in January 2010, but there has been worrisome erosion — more than one million viewers — especially in the younger demographic.

He still has numbers that just about any cable news host would envy and, with about two million viewers a night, outdraws all his competition combined. But the erosion is significant enough that Fox News officials are willing to say — anonymously, of course; they don’t want to be identified as criticizing the talent — that they are looking at the end of his contract in December and contemplating life without Mr. Beck.

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George Will tries to shut Tea Party out of 2012

From AMERICAblog Elections: The Right's Field:

One of the most interesting undertones of the 2012 Republican Presidential primary will be how the Republican establishment pushes back on the Tea Party and retakes control of their party. Tea Party enthusiasm was a big reason Republicans took back the House in 2010. But it's clear that the yokels touting Gadsden flags and protesting getting free healthcare are not the people Republican elites want picking their presidential candidate. As so it's not surprising when you see George Will, one of the most DC-centric establishment conservatives, using his column inches in the Washington Post to attack recent Birther-like statements by Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich as out of bounds. Will makes a reasonable case that this sort of discourse has no place in the Republican primary. But given that Birtherism is a reliable indicator of Republican partisanship, Will is really trying to shut out much of the Tea Party from the selection process and deny them a candidate who speaks their language.

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HSBC rumored to be planning move to Hong Kong

Of course, before the name was officially names HSBC is was Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation so it's not that strange. If the bank doesn't want to operate within the constraints of the UK/EU banking laws then they should be allowed to leave and try elsewhere. It also still means that if they continue to operate in the UK, EU or US they will still need to be regulated accordingly, in theory.

They're not the first bank in the UK to talk about Asia - Standard Chartered did and Goldman recently made a big move there - and they won't be the last. There is a certain feel to these decisions that doesn't feel right. Maybe they're fine but maybe this is where the banks see an easier ride by cooperative governments who will look the other way during a bubble. The real issue here is whether or not they will be as deeply regulated for their UK, US and EU business.

When things go south again (not "if") in the banking industry, will consumers be as exposed? Will governments suddenly be on the hook for billions and trillions more? Let them move, but both governments and consumers need even more protection in such circumstances. The financial fallout with the next crisis could be enormous.

Europe's biggest bank HSBC may move its headquarters from London to Hong Kong because of what it sees as high levels of tax and red tape in the UK, according to a report in the Sunday Telegraph.

The newspaper quoted unnamed investors who said they understood a move was "more than likely" and that there had been a "change of tone" as HSBC reviews its domicile, something the bank does every three years.

However, the bank maintained that it preferred to remain in the UK and said talk of an imminent change in its position was "entirely speculative and presumptuous".

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China monitoring and detaining foreign journalists

Yes, the problem in China is absolutely all about foreign journalists. It has nothing to do with some members of the population who disagree with the government. Detaining foreign journalists will solve all of the problems.

Isn't it great that Western governments sold out their people to this regime? NY Times:

Western journalists have lately been tolerated in China, if grudgingly, but the spread of revolution in the Middle East has prompted the authorities here to adopt a more familiar tack: suddenly, foreign reporters are being tracked and detained in the same manner — though hardly as roughly — as political dissidents.

On Sunday, about a dozen European and Japanese journalists in Shanghai were herded into an underground bunkerlike room and kept for two hours after they sought to monitor the response to calls on an anonymous Internet site for Chinese citizens to conduct a “strolling” protest against the government outside the Peace Cinema, near People’s Square in Shanghai.

In Beijing, several plainclothes officers planted themselves on Saturday night outside the home of an American correspondent who was severely beaten by security officers the previous week as he sought to cover a similar Internet-inspired protest there. Seven officers in two separate cars then trailed the reporter to a basketball game on Sunday, recording his trip on video the entire time, correspondents said.

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Protests banned in Saudi Arabia

Somehow "advising" hasn't managed to succeed in the Saudi kingdom. For a country that bans political parties because they are divisive, how is it possible to ignore the fact that a ruling council is making a statement that sounds an awful lot like what a political council would say? They hardly sound receptive to any advice from others outside of their group. Al Jazeera:

The warning from Saudi's council of senior scholars on Sunday follows a similar announcement by secular authorities a day earlier.

The 10-member council's statement, carried by state news agency SPA, said that "the correct way in sharia [Islamic law] of realising common interest is by advising, which is what the Prophet Muhammad established".

"Reform and advice should not be via demonstrations and ways that provoke strife and division, this is what the religious scholars of this country in the past and now have forbidden and warned against," the statement said.

"The council warns of deviant ideological and party-political connections since this nation is one and will adhere to the ways of the pious ancestors.

"The kingdom has not and will not allow ideas from the West or the East that take away from this Islamic identity and divide the unity of the whole."

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50% of German medical doctors prescribe placebos

As someone who generally doesn't react well to Big Pharma products, this is interesting. They include homeopathic remedies on the list which probably increases the number but even so, the numbers are high. The Guardian:

Recent research, he said, showed that placebos had helped 59% of patients who had been suffering from an upset stomach. Used to treat depression, placebos have the same effect as antidepressants in about a third of cases.

The efficacy of a placebo depends on many factors, according to the report, including the size and colour of a pill.

The more expensive the placebo, the higher the success rate, the study found, and intravenous injections are shown to be more effective than oral medication.

It's also a question of trust. Placebos produce better results if a patient feels their doctor understands their concerns, and believes they are being taken seriously, the study says.

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