http://www.cbs.com/late_night/liveonletterman/mgmt/video/

Health Care Reform ABC news

"Nobody will benefit from dropping the public option except for health insurance companies," said Blumenthal. "The fact that the public option is now on the chopping block is not a reflection of public opinion -- it is a reflection of the power of health insurance lobbyists."

How to Declutter

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit
For many people, organization may be a problem (If you are not a neat freak). This article will inform you about the process of decluttering your home; and your life.

Steps

1. Decide how often you are going to declutter a zone. Do a little every day - use a timer. But be warned - this can become compulsive! Once you get started you will want to clean like a banshee! Don't burn yourself out! Only do small amount at a time. The house did not get dirty overnight and it will not get clean overnight. When you set the timer you can only do two sessions at a time. This goal may seem unattainable right now, but you can do it in little pieces. In a couple of months, the whole house will be decluttered.
2. Gather together your decluttering Equipment: You will need garbage bags, boxes, magic markers, and a dust rag. Label the boxes "Give Away", "Throw Away", and "Put Away". Line the "Throw Away" box with a plastic garbage bag.
3. Start at the entrance to the room: Then, work your way around the room clockwise. Do not skip a spot. Whatever happens to be next, just do it.
4. Declutter Away! With boxes at your feet and dust rag in your waistband, start off by cleaning out and getting rid of the things that do not belong in this room. Put garbage in the "Throw Away" box, donations in the "Give Away" box, and stuff that goes somewhere else in the "Put Away" box. Don't worry that you do not have a place for everything right now. By the time you finish you will.
5. Ask yourself as you get rid of your clutter:Do I love this item? Have I used it in the past year? Is it really garbage? Do I have another one that is better? Should I really keep two? Does it have sentimental value that causes me to love it? Or does it give me guilt and make me sad when I see the item?
6. Get rid of the garbage! When the "Throw Away" box gets full, pull out the garbage bag, close it, and put it in the trash can, the pickup truck, or wherever you keep your garbage. Put a new garbage bag in the "Throw Away" box and keep on Flying until the timer goes off.
7. Donate! When the "Give Away" box gets full, seal it off, and put it in your car. The next time you are out, you can donate to the area thrift shop. Do not save your clutter for a yard or garage sale, you will be blessed by giving it away. The value can be deducted on your income tax. Remember you are trying to get rid of clutter - not relocate it somewhere else in your home. Now, grab another box, label it "Give Away", and get back to work.
8. "Put Away" Stuff: When the "Put Away" box gets full, take the box in your arms and run around the house and put the items in the room where they belong. If they have a place, put them there, if not put them in the room where they logically belong. By the time you have finished you will have a place for everything and everything will be in it's place.
Tips

• Rubbermaid or Sterilite plastic containers with lids are great for storing items. They can be stacked with the lids taped shut in the garage or shed.
• Don't spend more on a storage unit than what you are storing is worth. Many people spend $30 a month for years, only to one day clean out the unit or abandon the contents.
• Give yourself a few extra days before making the final discard - so as not to have any regrets or need for future repurchase.

Warnings

• Only set aside a group of things to sell (garage sale, eBay, etc.) if you know you will sell it, and not have it sit in a box for years. If you're a procrastinator, think twice about this.
• What you throw away today may end up the find of a lifetime in a garage sale or flea market later.

Things You'll Need

• Boxes.
• Garbage bags.
• Permanent markers

Related wikiHows

• How to Get Rid of Clutter
• How to Be Organized
• How to Organize a Kitchen
• How to Organize Your Desk
• How to Organize Your Desk to Aid the Needs of a Writer

Sources and Citations

• How to Declutter - Original source of this page. Shared with permission

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Declutter. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

http://www.wikihow.com/Special:Republish/Declutter

http://new.oberlin.edu/events-activities/commencement/haass-speech-2009remarks.dot for full transcript of his Commencement Address

"I was about to follow up with other questions when Condi cut me off. "You can save your breath, Richard. The president has already made up his mind on Iraq." The way she said it made clear that he had decided to go to war. This was eight months before the March 2003 start of the conflict. I was taken aback by the blunt substance and tone of her answer. Policy had gone much further than I had realized--and feared. I did not argue at that moment, for several reasons. As in previous conversations when I had voiced my views on Iraq, Condi's response made it clear that any more conversation at that point would be a waste of time. It is always important to pick your moments to make an unwelcome case, and this did not appear to be a promising one. I figured as well that there would be additional opportunities to argue my stance, if not with Condi, then with others in a position to make a difference."

A critique on WAMC public radio by Samuel Clayborne said Mr. Haas should have resigned or leaked info to the papers instead of 'doing his job' once he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the war had been pre-planned.

This article in Rolling Stone was written in 2006

America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

Photo by doveimaging.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/swine-flu-outbreak----nat_b_191408.html

This article explains how avian flu virus could have combined with the swine flu virus as birds landed in the lagoons of pig waste.

Swine Flu: Smithfield Foods' statement vs. the ugly truth

"However, Smithfield's statement fails to mention that countless residents of La Gloria were routinely and relentlessly exposed to airborne droplets of pig feces and decayed tissue for an undetermined number of years, thanks to toxic and sick-making clouds blowing outward from Granja Carrol's so-called "oxidation ponds"--or pig sewage lagoons. And that they have long complained of respiratory illnesses, well before their children started dying in March.

Nor does the company's statement explain that contracting the H1N1 influenza virus does NOT necessarily require that one "have contact with hogs"; in fact, the flu virus is spread via tiny droplets of infected matter--feces, body fluids--that reach the mucous membranes and lungs when someone touches a contaminated surface before rubbing his eyes, for example, or when he unwittingly inhales airborne, virus-containing waste droplets floating around his town, courtesy of a nearby pig or poultry CAFO."

Pictures of conditions at the Smithfield Foods plant are on this website; they are also on the news website  EnlaceVeracruz212 from 2006. 

Image above of a rotting pig carcass floating in the oxidation pond/pig-waste lagoon.

Smithfield Foods Implicated; From the latest edition of Mexico City's La Jornada (translated for you by LitBrit): excerpt follows:

"When reading about and reporting on swine flu--a virus--it's important to bear a couple of things in mind.

First, this swine flu virus contains elements of avian, human, and swine influenza. According to the CDC's partner website PandemicFlu.gov, avian (bird) flu is transmitted thus (emphasis mine):

Infected birds shed influenza virus in their saliva, nasal secretions, and feces. Susceptible birds become infected when they have contact with contaminated excretions or with surfaces that are contaminated with excretions or secretions. Wild bird avian influenza viruses of low pathogenicity mix with avian viruses in domesticated birds and become highly pathogenic in poultry. Domestic poultry may become infected with avian influenza virus through direct contact with infected waterfowl or other infected poultry or through contact with surfaces (such as dirt or cages) or materials (such as feces or feed) that have been contaminated with droppings that harbor the low-pathogenicity virus.

In other words, low pathogenic avian influenza, which naturally occurs in wild birds, can spread to domestic birds; the relatively mildly-pathogenic flu can become "highly pathogenic" when domestic poultry come in contact with infected birds--or with feed or feces that has been contaminated by the droppings of wild birds. And from there, other animals can contract the virus. For example, during the last major flu outbreak, the H5N1 avian flu virus also infected cats in Europe."

Second, the aforementioned CAFO--Granjas Carrol, subsidiary of Smithfield Foods--is essentially an enormous, concentrated hog farm, and while hog farms are not what anyone would call the cleanest places in the world, one would expect the massive doses of antibiotics CAFO's routinely administer to confined livestock would keep infections at bay, right?

In a word, NO.

Influenza is a virus, not a bacteria, and antibiotics treat, and prevent the spread of, bacterial infections--this is likely why the drugged-up pigs didn't get sick all that time, meanwhile the unprotected residents of nearby La Gloria constantly complained of respiratory infections, most likely bacterial--at first. At some point in the recent past, however, a new mutation of the flu virus, the triple-whammy H1N1 bird-pig-human combo bug, found its way to the infamous clouds of pig waste and flies drifting across--and spreading outward from--the "oxidation ponds" about which Granjas Carrol/Smithfield released only partial information, and about which they are still remaining (mostly) quiet. Even as people have begun dying of those infections in what are, quite frankly, alarming numbers.

Finally, a question: what of the connection between avian flu and this new swine flu, with its human, avian, and swine DNA--is there one?

He [Mexico's Chairman of the Committee on the Environment, Marco Antonio Núñez López] was referring to another CAFO, this one containing poultry, called Granjas de Bachoco, located near the state capital of Xalapa. He said there was an epidemic of avian flu among the chickens being raised there, but that this was being kept quiet so as not to interfere with exports. Influenza-infected chickens raise the risk of cross-infection to pigs in the same area, scientists say.

Further reading:

The article in Grist, by Tom Philpott, that connects Smithfield to the Swine Flu outbreak
The World Health Organization's Swine Flu information center
The Center for Disease Control's Swine Flu information center

"We are being admired by Swedes! We don't have to pretend we're Canadians. We elected Barack Obama!

By Garrison Keillor


Nov. 12, 2008 | Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn't gloating, it's satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor -- he said, "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He'll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can't imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference -- the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis -- you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early '90s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of the Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could've written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama's is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election a while longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails -- imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes the First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty,"
published by Viking.)"

This is a quote from the article