![[Conservationists fear the decision to allow Shell to drill for offshore oil in the Arctic will threaten polar bears and endangered animals. (Photograph: Hans Strand/ Hans Strand/Corbis)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/Polar-Bear-on-Iceberg-001.jpg "Polar-Bear-on-Iceberg-001.jpg")
After nearly a decade of the Bush Admin playing with statistics to ensure no one would know how bad it was, I give full credit to Obama for allowing his National Academy of Sciences to correct their poverty formula (or at least begin correcting it) so it reflects the real world instead of deliberately violating it.
http://casadelogo.typepad.com/factesque/2009/10/americans-in-poverty.html#more
Welcome to the richest country in the world. Thanks, Republicons!
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On the public option, respondents were asked, "Would you support or oppose having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans?" 57% supported it and 40% opposed. When the public option was weakened -- "What if this government-sponsored plan was run by state governments and was available only to people who did not have a choice of affordable private insurance? In that case would you support or oppose this idea?" -- it got a whole lot less popular. 45% supported and 49% opposed.
And on the bipartisanship question, I think people are starting to get it. Yes, bipartisanship is nice, but not if you have to sacrifice results:
http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2009/10/poll-public-option-preferred-over.html
The UN figures we'll need to increase food production by 70% over the next 40 years to keep hundreds of millions from starving. Looking at historical food production trends, it seems like cereal production has sort of kept pace with population growth (although seafood production has pretty much peaked if not actually declined a bit). But historical trend analysis doesn't take into account the projected negative impact of global warming on crop production.
Or more immediately, it doesn't take into account the growing diversion of cereal crops into biofuels (a process actually subsidized by your tax dollars so you can pay more to fill both your tank and your tummy!), nor the challenges of worldwide water stress.
Until now the trends have supported the self-indulgent skeptics (those fortunate enough to live in the developed world at least) who have blithely scoffed the warnings of the food-security crowd. However we're looking at a 'perfect storm' of factors that will throw ever larger populations of folks in various regions into the food have-not category much earlier than that in the UN 40-year time frame.
*Update* Just to put this in perspective, UN says 1 in 6 people are facing famine today as developed countries both cut food aid and increase biofuel subsidies.
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Fewer middle-income families would qualify for tax credits to purchase health insurance, under a little-noticed change to the Senate Finance Committee health bill made just before the markup began in late September.Under the bill, eligible individuals and families with annual incomes of between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line would receive tax credits to cover the cost of insurance purchased through state exchanges. As part of a package of managers' modifications, Finance Chairman Max Baucus changed the definition of income from "modified adjusted gross income," or AGI plus investment interest, to simply "modified gross income."
That is a departure from the way all other federal tax credits are calculated, and it means when determining eligibility for the credit, the IRS would have to disregard a household's usual above-the-line deductions, such as for individual retirement account contributions and college tuition.
It really is awesome how these guys think- make everything more complicated, save very little, and screw the folks who need the help while mandating they buy insurance. About the only thing missing is mandating they give up their first born. Well played, President Baucus!
There seriously are days I think half the Democrats in the Senate are Republican moles.
The party of Grand Poopbah Lush Limpballs is dwindling in size like their leader's tiny dysfunctional........ well, you know
And, perhaps most troubling for GOP hopes is the fact that just 20 percent of the Post sample identified themselves as Republicans, the lowest that number has been in Post polling since 1983. (No, that is not a typo.)
That's not to say that 2009 hasn't been a good year for Republicans. By and large, it has been.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, foams at the mouth all over the pages of the Washington Post (or is it on the website only?) about the threat from "secular saboteurs" and the gays and "moral anarchists" and the gays and "sexual libertines" and the gays and Hollywood and the gays and the ACLU and the gays and Democrats and the gays. It must be read to be believed. Last paragraph:
The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.I don't know: every time you walk your dog, an angel dies.
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