- Massive Insurance Rate Hike In California Despite Slow Growth in National Health Care Spending
- [Firedoglake - Jon Walker]
…Blue Shield of California seeks rate hikes of as much as 59% for individuals…. BSC claims the cost of health care has risen rapidly.
- Social Security 101
- I am writing this after seeing young progressives I respect parrot conservative lies told about Social Security. It appears that the press has done a bang-up job of NOT reporting the truth about Social Security…
My career, pre-blogging, was as third-party administrator of employer-provided retirement plans. For years I was a certified practitioner, and I watched as private pensions were systematically dismantled, underfunded, and ultiimately converted to 401k plans subject to the whims of the market and unsophisticated investors. While owners might — MIGHT — have retired with adequate funds, workers almost never did. The one single thing that every worker could always count on at retirement was (and is) Social Security.
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- The Constitution Protects Women Despite Justice Scalia’s Views
- [ACLU Blog - Lenora Lapidus]
In a recent interview with California Lawyer, Justice Scalia stated that women are not protected by the Constitution.
- Birther Interrupts House Reading Of Constitution, Yells ‘Help Us Jesus’ (VIDEO) | TPMMuckraker
- [via Little Green Footballs]
- Global spam levels suddenly fall – BBC News
- The amount of junk e-mail being sent across the globe has seen a sudden, sharp – and not entirely understood – fall.
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- Amnesty International: Rep. King Unfit to Chair Homeland Security Committee
- In the past few weeks Congressman King… has attracted a great deal of media attention for labeling Wikileaks a terrorist organization (a stretch by any definition of the term) and calling for the prosecution of the New York Times under the Espionage Act.
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- Two Days Later, and Still No Word from Chick-fil-A on Ties to Anti-Gay Group
- [Change.org's Blog Network - Michael A. Jones]
- The logo and women
- How do you design a logo for a women's or feminist organisation? If this visual essay at Art Fag City is anything to go by, it's quite difficult to come up with something original…
Swirly representations of women's dancing figures loom large in the logos of organisations in the women's sector, as well as women's support groups, health and beauty firms.
Not only is this repetitive and a little dull, the use of an image of a headless, faceless woman or women can be seen as problematic, as it plays into the 'woman as symbol not person' trope, and defining women in terms of our bodies (or rather an idea about what our bodies 'should' look like).
- Can sitting too much kill you?
- …even if you are meeting current physical activity guidelines by exercising for one hour per day… that leaves 15 to 16 hours per day when you are not being active. Does it matter how you spend those hours… whether you spend those 16 hours sitting on your butt, versus standing or walking at a leisurely pace? …new evidence suggests that it does matter, and in a big way.
- Being Born in U.S. No Longer Good Enough for Republican State Lawmakers
- [Above the Law - Elie Mystal]
They hate that at the end of the day, our justice is blind. They hate that even the lowliest among us have rights. They hate not what America is, but what it promises to be.
- The Agonizing Last Words of Bill Zeller
- [Trigger warning for discussion of depression, suicide, and rape. -L]
…I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people…. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am…
Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don't want people to wonder why I did this.
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- House Reading Amended Slavery-Free Constitution This Morning | TPMDC
- The reading is largely a political maneuver, so it's no real surprise that the Constitution you'll hear read on C-SPAN this morning will be the politically correct version.
It's fairly likely that no elected politician wants to stand up and read aloud the Founder's vision of African Americans as equaling three-fifths of a white person, so the GOP has decided to leave that part, and others, out…
[Myself, I don't think we have earned the right to erase the harmful history of U.S. law. -L]
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- Making the case for surrender
- [Hullabaloo - digby]
[A short and depressing observation on William Daley, the new White House Chief of Staff, and his involvement in the election 2000 Florida recount. -L]
- U.S Bumble Bee Population Drops 96%
- [Sustainability Ninja - Sarah Fobes]
A new study, led by Prof. Sydney Cameron, a massive 3 year national census of wild bee populations, reveals that the suspected bumble bee decline is far worse than suspected.
…Wikileaks shed some interesting light on the bee problem, take a look at the Wikileaks EPA-Honeybee connection. [link]
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
The Of interest (Thu, Jan 6th, 11am) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.