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Hospital CEO Thinks It’s Perfectly OK To Show Patient’s Records To Newspaper – The Consumerist
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Debunking The GOP’s Power Grab Meme: Obama’s Made Only 29 Recess Appointments
…Obama has made fewer recess appointments than Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes.
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Anesthesia as a consciousness scalpel « Mind Hacks
In this case, the experiment tested whether people had conscious experiences despite being unable to respond to outside stimuli – the medical definition of being unconscious.
It turns out the conscious mind keeps working way past the point where people are medically defined as unconscious.
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Northern California scientists say they have found a possible explanation for the honey bee die-off: A parasitic fly that hijacks the bees’ bodies and causes them to abandon hives.
The symptoms mirror colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly disappear. The disorder continues to decimate hives in the U.S. and overseas.
The disease is of great concern, because bees pollinate about a third of the United States’ food supply. Its presence is especially alarming in California, the nation’s top producer of fruits and vegetables, where bees play an essential role in the $1 billion almond industry and other crops. …
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Abramoff as Ethics Guru Latest Chapter in Political Second Acts – Businessweek
Mandatory ethics training this year for the 138 members of the Kentucky legislature features a lecture by Jack Abramoff, a convicted felon at the center of Washington’s biggest lobbying corruption scandal.
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Gordon Hirabayashi, WWII Internment Opponent, Was 93 – NYTimes.com
…was imprisoned for defying the federal government’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II but was vindicated four decades later when his conviction was overturned, died on Monday in Edmonton, Alberta. …
Mr. Hirabayashi and his fellow Japanese-Americans Fred Korematsu and Minoru Yasui, who all brought lawsuits before the Supreme Court, emerged as symbols of protest against unchecked governmental powers in a time of war.
“I want vindication not only for myself,” Mr. Hirabayashi told The New York Times in 1985 as he was fighting to have his conviction vacated. “I also want the cloud removed from over the heads of 120,000 others. My citizenship didn’t protect me one bit. Our Constitution was reduced to a scrap of paper.”
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Santorum: States Should Have The Right To Outlaw Birth Control | ThinkProgress – Jan 3, 2012
Rick Santorum reiterated his belief that states should have the right to outlaw contraception during an interview with ABC News …
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Daily Kos: Home: From Displacement Camps to Community in Haiti
As 2012 begins, a growing movement of displaced people and their allies in Haiti is actively claiming the right to housing, which is recognized by both the Haitian constitution and international treaties to which Haiti is signatory.
Haitians displaced by the earthquake two years ago face many crises, but perhaps none worse than ongoing homelessness. …
While urging systemic and legislative solutions, Haiti’s right-to-housing movement is also constructing transformative paradigms of housing and community. This is especially important because what little housing has been created since the earthquake has largely missed the mark in terms of need. Colette Lespinasse, director of the Support Group for Repatriates and Refugees (GARR by its French acronym) says, “What we were seeing in terms of housing plans has come largely from foreigners, with proposals for pre-fabricated houses that responded more to the interests and needs of businessmen. In general, the proposals don’t correspond to Haitian culture or our climate, and also don’t give people a chance to learn techniques themselves that they can use to continue building on their own.”
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Daily Kos: Romney’s “Merit Society”
…Mitt Romney argued that America needs to return to being a meritocracy. However, he astutely avoided using the word “meritocracy”, instead he danced around it, saying “the right course for America is to remain a merit society”. It was as if the word was too big, as if he was concerned that people might not understand him. …
He is at once saying the best and brightest need to raise to the top, and that you’re not it.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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