n2doc
n2doc's JournalThe Copycat strikes again
Clinton proposes $275 billion in new infrastructure spending
By LISA LERER
BOSTON (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton called for hundreds of billions in new federal spending on infrastructure on Sunday, kicking off what her campaign says will be a month-long focus on job creation.
Standing before a backdrop of union workers and students, the Democratic presidential frontrunner vowed to rebuild "ladders of opportunity" and give a greater number of Americans a "middle-class lifestyle."
"Investing infrastructure makes our economy more productive and competitive," she said at the launch of "Hard Hats for Hillary," a new effort by her campaign to mobilize union workers. "To build a strong economy for our future, we must start by building strong infrastructure today."
…
Her announcement comes as Clinton faces down challenges from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who've both stressed the need to increase direct federal spending. Sanders has proposed legislation that would provide more than $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending over the next five years, paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d0600cca0e314ac08bef9f1a3ad8f825/clinton-proposes-275-billion-new-infrastructure-spending
Always a pale crippled imitation of what Sanders has already proposed. Weak sauce.
The end of migraines is close: A new drug could stop debilitating headaches before they start
The 63-year-old chief executive couldn’t do his job. He had been crippled by migraine headaches throughout his adult life and was in the middle of a new string of attacks. “I have but a little moment in the morning in which I can either read, write or think,” he wrote to a friend. After that, he had to shut himself up in a dark room until night. So President Thomas Jefferson, in the early spring of 1807, during his second term in office, was incapacitated every afternoon by the most common neurological disability in the world.
The co-author of the Declaration of Independence never vanquished what he called his “periodical head-ach,” although his attacks appear to have lessened after 1808. Two centuries later 36 million American migraine sufferers grapple with the pain the president felt. Like Jefferson, who often treated himself with a concoction brewed from tree bark that contained quinine, they try different therapies, ranging from heart drugs to yoga to herbal remedies. Their quest goes on because modern medicine, repeatedly baffled in attempts to find the cause of migraine, has struggled to provide reliable relief.
Now a new chapter in the long and often curious history of migraine is being written. Neurologists believe they have identified a hypersensitive nerve system that triggers the pain and are in the final stages of testing medicines that soothe its overly active cells. These are the first ever drugs specifically designed to prevent the crippling headaches before they start, and they could be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration next year. If they deliver on the promise they have shown in studies conducted so far, which have involved around 1,300 patients, millions of headaches may never happen.
“It completely changes the paradigm of how we treat migraine,” says David Dodick, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic’s campus in Arizona and president of the International Headache Society. Whereas there are migraine-specific drugs that do a good job stopping attacks after they start, the holy grail for both patients and doctors has been prevention.
more
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/29/the_end_of_migraines_could_be_close_partner/
The Central Valley is sinking: drought forces farmers to ponder the abyss
On a day when the skies were ashen from the smoke of distant wildfires, Chase Hurley kept his eyes trained on the slower-moving disaster at ground level: collapsing levees, buckling irrigation canals, water rising up over bridges and sloshing over roads.
This is the hidden disaster of California’s drought. So much water has been pumped out of the ground that vast areas of the Central Valley are sinking, destroying millions of dollars in infrastructure in the gradual collapse.
Four years of drought – and the last two years of record-smashing heat – have put water in extremely short supply.
Such climate-charged scenarios form the backdrop to the United Nations negotiations starting in Paris on 30 November, which are seeking to agree on collective action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But the real-time evidence of climate change and the other effects of human interference in natural systems are already changing the contours of California’s landscape.
more
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/28/california-central-valley-sinking-farmers-deepwater-wells
Carly Fiorina, Cop Killer: after terrorist attack on Planned Parenthood, she must drop out of race
By Bill Palmer |
Carly Fiorina was never fit to be a leader in the business world, and this year we’ve definitively seen that she’s not fit to lead in the political world either. Now she’s shown us something else: she’s not fit to be a public figure, period. In one of the most egregious political campaigns in recent memory, she focused on spreading vicious lies about Planned Parenthood in the hopes of climbing in the polls, knowing full well that the people she was pandering to were well armed and mentally disturbed. Now a police officer and other innocent people are dead as a direct result of Fiorina’s campaign – which she must now end. Immediately.
Long after the “Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts” videos were shown to be dishonestly edited and didn’t depict a Planned Parenthood clinic to begin with, Fiorina continued insisting that the organization was chopping up babies for profit. She made that disproven lie the focus of her campaign, and she briefly skyrocketed in republican polls, before even mainstream conservatives eventually figured out that she was a vicious pathological liar and gave up on her campaign.
Yet she continued beating the Planned Parenthood drum, and sure enough, one of the mentally disturbed “conservative christian” gun nuts she had been manipulating inevitably shot up one of the group’s clinics this weekend. Among the dead: a police officer who also served as a church pastor on the weekends, and oh by the way, his family says he happened to be morally opposed to abortion. So not only is Carly Fiorina a cop killer, and not only did she intentionally incite a domestic terrorist attack against the United States, she managed to get one of her own anti-abortion leaders murdered in the process. Not that she much cares about the abortion issue to begin with, other than as a political wedge.
Even as Donald Trump continues to incite his supporters to violence against the minorities who show up at his rallies with a campaign which gets far more attention due to his republican frontrunner status, the case can be made that Fiorina is running an even more disturbing, and certainly more deadly, campaign. There has never been anything quite like this in modern American politics. She was never going to come close to winning her party’s nomination, yet she continues with her campaign for no reasons other than ego and denial. Now cop-killer Carly Fiorina must drop out before her hatemongering rhetoric gets anyone else killed.
http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/after-inciting-terrorist-attack-against-planned-parenthood-carly-fiorina-must-drop-out-of-the-race/23132/
Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged
Despite all the attention focused these days on the fortunes of the “1 percent,” debates over inequality still tend to ignore one of its most politically destabilizing and economically destructive forms. This is the growing, and historically unprecedented, economic divide that has emerged in recent decades among the different regions of the United States.
Until the early 1980s, a long-running feature of American history was the gradual convergence of income across regions. The trend goes back to at least the 1840s, but grew particularly strong during the middle decades of the 20th century. This was, in part, a result of the South catching up with the North in its economic development. As late as 1940, per-capita income in Mississippi, for example, was still less than one-quarter that of Connecticut. Over the next 40 years, Mississippians saw their incomes rise much faster than did residents of Connecticut, until by 1980 the gap in income had shrunk to 58 percent.
Yet the decline in regional equality wasn’t just about the rise of the “New South.” It also reflected the rising standard of living across the Midwest and Mountain West—or the vast territory now known dismissively in some quarters as “flyover states.” In 1966, the average per-capita income of greater Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was only $87 less than that of New York City and its suburbs. Ranked among the country’s top 25 richest metro areas in the mid-1960s were Rockford, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Des Moines, Iowa; and Cleveland, Ohio.
During this period, to be sure, many specific metro areas saw increases in local inequality, as many working- and middle-class families, as well as businesses, fled inner-city neighborhoods for fast-expanding suburbs. Yet in their standards of living, metro regions as a whole, along with states as a whole, were growing much more similar. According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 1940, Missourians earned only 62 percent as much as Californians; by 1980 they earned 80 percent as much. In 1969, per capita income in the St. Louis metro area was 83 percent as high as in the New York metro area; it would rise to 90 percent by the end of the 1970s.
more
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/cities-economic-fates-diverge/417372/
A Wealthy Governor and His Friends Are Remaking Illinois
The richest man in Illinois does not often give speeches. But on a warm spring day two years ago, Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, rose before a black-tie dinner of the Economic Club of Chicago to deliver an urgent plea to the city’s elite.
They had stood silently, Mr. Griffin told them, as politicians taxed too much, spent too much and drove businesses and jobs from the state. They had refused to help those who would take on the reigning powers in the Illinois Capitol. “It is time for us to do something,” he implored.
Their response came quickly. In the months since, Mr. Griffin and a small group of rich supporters — not just from Chicago, but also from New York City and Los Angeles, southern Florida and Texas — have poured tens of millions of dollars into the state, a concentration of political money without precedent in Illinois history.
Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state’s balance of power. Last year, the families helped elect as governor Bruce Rauner, a Griffin friend and former private equity executive from the Chicago suburbs, who estimates his own fortune at more than $500 million. Now they are rallying behind Mr. Rauner’s agenda: to cut spending and overhaul the state’s pension system, impose term limits and weaken public employee unions.
“It was clear that they wanted to change the power structure, change the way business was conducted and change the status quo,” said Andy Shaw, an acquaintance of Mr. Rauner’s and the president of the Better Government Association, a nonpartisan state watchdog group.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/us/politics/illinois-campaign-money-bruce-rauner.html?smid=re-share&_r=0
What to Know About 'BernieCare,' Sanders' Health Overhaul
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, ASSOCIATED PRESS
The most ambitious "repeal and replace" health care plan from a presidential candidate comes from Sen. Bernie Sanders, not from a Republican.
The Vermont independent who's seeking the Democratic nomination has been chastised by front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton for espousing an all-inclusive, government-run system.
It's called the "single-payer" plan, loosely modeled on how health care is financed in Canada and most of Western Europe.
Basically it means putting almost all the $3.2 trillion-a-year U.S. health care system in the hands of the federal government, with states acting as administrative subcontractors.
Currently, government at all levels pays about half of the nation's health care bill.
more
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/berniecare-sanders-health-overhaul-35460630
Aside from the usual 'can't happen here' stuff, some interesting information. And screw HRC's lies.
Juan Cole- Abortion Clinics, White Christian Terrorism and GOP Candidates
Americans are more at risk from violence by armed white Christian fanatics than they ever were from Muslims.
Abortion clinics have been targeted for violence by fundamentalist Christians of a violent bent for decades. In 2009, Dr. George Tiller was relentlessly shot to death by Scott Roeder, who insisted that the good doctor was satanic because he performed abortions. Dr. John Britton was murdered in 1994 on similar grounds. A strain of Christianity in the United States has never accepted Roe v. Wade, which made it a woman’s right to have an abortion. Not accepting it for oneself is a matter of conscience, and there is nothing wrong with that. But not accepting it for other people is a form of coercion aimed at depriving them of a legal right.
Deploying violence against people to halt abortions is the textbook definition of terrorism, which in the 1990s the Federal Code sensibly defined as non-state actors using violence against civilians to achieve a political aim. Much violence and coercion at Planned Parenthood (only 3% of its activity has to do with abortion) is inspired by Christian fundamentalism.
On this point, Christian ultra-conservativism agrees with the point of view of the Malik school of law among Muslims. In essence, Christian terrorists are attempting to move the United States on the below map away from a modern European norm, where abortion is elective up to a certain point in pregnancy, to an Afro-Asian and Maliki Muslim norm where it is often forbidden except to save the mother’s life (or not even then).
more
http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/christian-terrorism-candidates.html
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