More Cliffs Ahead, But Congress Isn't. Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony) If we trace back the accepted opinion that Congress is broken, a turning point came right after President Obama's first inauguration when Sen. Mitch McConnell, speaking for all Republicans, it seems, said that his mission was to make Obama a one-term president.
The intractable divisions that made the fiscal cliff a nightmare - and a ridiculous spectacle - go back much further, as everyone knows. But David Brooks exploded conventional wisdom when he said that the chief myth in politics today is that a reasonable nation is saddled with an irrationally antagonistic Congress. In reality, Brooks points out, voters don't want to make sacrifices, and they elect those candidates who uphold their refusal.
Senate Hits New Low as Mitch McConnell Filibusters Himself. WASHINGTON, DC, December 6 — With his latest move of unprecedented stupidity and bewildering ineptness, Mitch McConnell officially killed political satire. Several professional writers and academics confirmed that McConnell's filibustering of himself represented the final step in government incompetence completely undermining the previously-subversive voice of thousands of satirists. After years of all three branches of government consistently managing to be more backwards and idiotic than the combined creative satirical talents could produce in fiction, Senator McConnell's recent piece of mindblowing dickbaggery was simply the final nail in the coffin. "I don't see what the point is anymore.
"When a person who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars to represent the country can come out and publicly say that they're disregarding their duty to govern responsibly in favor of partisan bullshit, that's already pulling the rug out from underneath satirists. There goes our best angle! Push to step up domestic use of drones. Washington -- Are unmanned aircraft, known to have difficulty avoiding collisions, safe to use in America's crowded airspace? And would their widespread use for surveillance result in unconstitutional invasions of privacy? Experts say neither question has been answered satisfactorily. Yet the federal government is rushing to open America's skies to tens of thousands of the drones - pushed to do so by a law championed by manufacturers of the unmanned aircraft.
The drone makers have sought congressional help to speed their entry into a domestic market valued in the billions. The 60-member House of Representatives' "drone caucus" - officially, the House Unmanned Systems Caucus - has helped push that agenda. And over the past four years, caucus members have drawn nearly $8 million in drone-related campaign contributions, an investigation by Hearst Newspapers and the Center for Responsive Politics shows. Flood of applications Major safety issue Who gets the money Sen. Purpose of 'drone caucus' 12 interesting facts you probably didn’t know. Why We Should All Care About the Today's Senate Vote on the FISA Amendments Act, the Warrantless Domestic Spying Bill. Today is an incredibly important vote for the future of your digital privacy, but some in Congress are hoping you won’t find out.
Finally, after weeks of delay, the Senate will start debate on the dangerous FISA Amendments Act at 10 am Eastern and vote on its re-authorization by the end of the day. The FISA Amendments Act is the broad domestic spying bill passed in 2008 in the wake of the warrantless wiretapping scandal. It expires at the end of the year and some in Congress wanted to re-authorize it without a minute of debate. The good news is—thanks for your phone calls, emails, and tweets—Congress will now be forced to debate it, which means we can affect its outcome. In case you forget just how dangerous the FISA Amendments Act is to your privacy, here’s how we described it last week: The FISA Amendments Act continues to be controversial; key portions of it were challenged in a case before the U.S.
The Wyden Oversight and Transparency Amendments Sen. The Merkley FISA Court Amendment. Say Goodbye to the Government, Under Either Fiscal Plan. What Businesses Are Doing Wrong on Social Media (And 5 Tips For Success) Flu vaccine attitudes abroad differ from U.S. This year's flu shot is 62% effective, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. and Canada are the only countries to suggest vaccinating nearly everyoneThis year's flu vaccine is only 62% effective.Some worry that enthusiasm for the vaccine stops progress on more effective ones (CNN) -- The flu hasn't hit Europe as hard as it has the United States, health officials say, but when and if it does, don't expect a call for vaccination of the entire population.
Only the U.S. and Canada actually encourage everyone older than 6 months to get the flu vaccine. Apparently, not a single country in Europe asks the general population to seek that same kind of protection, according to Robb Butler, the World Health Organization technical officer in vaccine preventable diseases and immunizations in the organization's Europe office in the Netherlands. Lab developing long-lasting flu shot Inside a flu vaccine lab CDC director takes your flu questions Are we near a flu peak?
Stretch Your Money Farther with These Global Travel Hacks. Are You in the 1 Percent? LinkedIn Congratulates Its Elite Members. Heat makes honey toxic, and other myths of the hive. Dear Lou, I heard a rumor that honey is toxic when placed in hot water. Is that true? Doesn’t the whole world drink honey in hot tea? Also wondering about the harvesting of honey — is it harmful to the bees and their sustainability? Honey Lover from Vermont Dearest Honey Lover from Vermont, I didn’t find any convincing studies on the toxicity of honey in water, but I did find this most interesting quote through an Internet search on the topic: According to ayurveda, honey shoud [sic] should never to be used heated directly or indirectly internally is it devolopes [sic] toxicity when heated, exept [sic] when performing basty (enema).
Who knew honey could be so versatile? For a more credible answer to your question, I rang up Ross Conrad, a fellow Vermonter and author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture. “The idea is that heat destroys enzymes. That said, there’s no evidence that heat-treated honey is actually toxic. “Or get your own bees. Er, enemies. Lou. Congress: Sequester your own salaries. To be delivered to: The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama Petition Background The across-the-board cuts set to go into effect at the end of the week will hurt the economy, and they should be stopped. But if Congress insists on cutting anyone's salary, they should cut their own paychecks first. In fact, they have proposed a 20% across-the-board pay cut for 800,000 federal employees - all while leaving their salaries safely intact.
After all, we pay their salaries. As a state politician in Maine, I am seeing first-hand the devastating impact these cuts will have on our local communities. Because of the 27th amendment, Congress can't change their salaries until 2014, but if the sequester happens, it'll cut public services for the next 10 years. Sandy Hook shooting: Possible second gunman in custody. Newtown school shooting story already being changed by the media to eliminate eyewitness reports of a second shooter. (NaturalNews) The article which originally appeared here has been removed because it is no longer aligned with the science-based investigative mission of Natural News. In late 2013 / early 2014, Mike Adams (the Health Ranger), editor of Natural News, transitioned from outspoken activist to environmental scientist. He now runs the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, conducting world-class food science research and publishing scientific papers on food contaminants and nutritional analytics.
Through scientific investigation powered by university-level analytical instrumentation, Adams found that, much like the majority of the population, he had been suffering over the past several years from chronic exposure to cumulative toxic elements found in the food supply, including in many organics and "superfoods. " Notably, Adams found that exposure to toxic elements in foods altered his mindset, outlook on life and degree of happiness in the world. "Everything is at stake. . • Scientific papers. Texas Republicans are shocked to learn that birth control prevents pregnancy. Well, no one could have seen this one coming. Last year Texas Republicans took $73 million away from family planning services to protect taxpayers from the evils of Planned Parenthood's non-existent abortion services. And now? The latest Health and Human Services Commission projections being circulated among Texas lawmakers indicate that during the 2014-15 biennium, poor women will deliver an estimated 23,760 more babies than they would have, as a result of their reduced access to state-subsidized birth control.
The additional cost to taxpayers is expected to be as much as $273 million — One Democratic representative said of her Republican colleagues, "in retrospect they did not fully grasp the implications. " Well, sure. Who could have predicted it? So yes, if only they had known. And now there's a bipartisan coalition trying to come up with a way to restore the funding. Any such agreement would almost certainly exclude Planned Parenthood from future financing.
Of course. Fresh Air Interview: Daniel Handler. Hide captionDaniel Handler wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. He has also penned several books for adults under his own name. Meredith Heuer/Little, Brown & Co. It's been more than six years since Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, concluded his enormously popular 13-volume young adult series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Now Handler has revived the Snicket narrator in his YA novel Who Could That Be at This Hour? The book is the first of a series — All the Wrong Questions — and a prequel to A Series of Unfortunate Events. While the Unfortunate Events books play with ideas about gothic literature, All the Wrong Questions explores detective-noir conventions. "They're both confined by their circumstances," he says, "and they're both making their own moral path through a world that is sinister and secretive. ... Interview Highlights On how the journey of a detective mirrors that of childhood On using sophisticated vocabulary in his books "Everything.
Exxon Hates Your Children. The Problem Isn't Growth; the Problem Is Inequality. (Image: Hoarding wealth via Shutterstock)The cumulative inflation-adjusted growth in the US economy since Barack Obama took office has been just 3.2%. Not per year. Total. Over the past four years the US economy has grown by less than one percent per year. The US population grows by about 0.95% per year. The net result is that the income per person generated by the US economy has been essentially flat for four years. You can’t blame the President for wanting to focus on boosting economic growth in his second term. But that’s not the real story. Some of us are old enough to remember 2006. The poverty rate was 10.6%, not 13.1%. How can things be so much worse now when the economy is essentially in the same place it was five or six years ago? The answer in two words is: Rising inequality. As the economy as a whole has remained flat, the plutonomy — the economy of the super-wealthy — has continued to rise.
It’s not advanced statistics. Growth is great. We had 4.6% unemployment in 2006. Study: Tea party a long-planned creation of big tobacco, Koch brothers. For many on the left, the idea that there was a spontaneous uprising of American patriots concerned by the out-of-control growth of our government has been bunk from the outset. We based that on the simple observation that there was an awful lot of awfully big money behind making sure that people went to teabagger rallies and that those rallies got a disproportionate amount of media attention.
In a word, it was clearly astroturf. A new academic study confirms what we knew all along, and far more: "Rather than being a purely grassroots movement that spontaneously developed in 2009, the Tea Party has developed over time, in part through decades of work by the tobacco industry and other corporate interests. " The full study is behind a paywall, but Brendan DeMelle, writing at Huffington Post has the details. Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. The Kochs clearly hate clean air.