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"Health Insurance Insider: 'They Dump the Sick'":

"[T]hey confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors," former Cigna senior executive Wendell Potter said during a hearing on health insurance today before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Potter, who has more than 20 years of experience working in public relations for insurance companies Cigna and Humana, said companies routinely drop seriously ill policyholders so they can meet "Wall Street's relentless profit expectations."

"They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment," Potter said. "…(D)umping a small number of enrollees can have a big effect on the bottom line."

"Insurance industry will end rescission in May":

The health insurance industry has decided to end its practice of cancelling claims once a patient gets sick next month, well before the new health care law would have required it, the industry’s chief spokesman said Wednesday.

"While many health plans already abide by the standards outlined in the new law, our community is committed to implementing the new standards in May 2010 to ensure that individuals and families will have greater peace of mind when purchasing coverage on their own," AHIP president and chief executive Karen Ignagni said in a letter to top House Democrats.

Clearly, "the 10 most dangerous words in the English language are, 'Hi, I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.'"

Medical News Today: Sexist Men Earn More

The American Prospect: Give 'Em Hell, Barry

Xtra!: Archie Comics' history of whitewashing, censorship & the religious right

When a journalist has nothing to say, but keeps rambling, you wind up with passages like this, about Sandra Bullock adopting an African child:

Consequently, some readers have wondered if Bullock's adoption of a black child is calculated to further distance herself from James's poisonous reputation. It's perhaps a far-fetched notion—Bullock says that she adopted her son, Louis, three months ago—but it's nonetheless a unique and thought-provoking one.

In other words, hey, the evidence says that can't be, but let's make like we're on to something here.

"Police state: How Mexico treats illegal aliens."

It doesn't get much dumber than that. You can sum up her argument as "other countries are worse, so it doesn't matter if we're bad. As long as you're not an outright Nazi, everything's fine."

But then again, this is not surprising coming from the world's only apologist for the Japanese internment.

"Peace that could happen (but won't)."

The argument from ignorance: Powerline's "Don't leave it to Cleaver, part 10."

The obvious logical error isn't the interesting part though, it's the wishful thinking that fuels it. It's very comforting to ignore Cleaver's claims though obviously faulty logic, and the very thought of dealing with the Tea Party's problems with race in any meaningful way is too unpleasant to contemplate.

"Glenn Beck has lost 1/3 of its TV audience since January."

"The Washington Post Cannot Tell Obama From Malcolm X."

Center for Economic and Policy Research: Why Is It Front Page News That Goldman Bet Against the Housing Bubble?

ThinkProgress: U.S. Chamber of Commerce Coordinating Wall Street’s Stealth Lobbying Campaign To Kill Reform

L.A. Times: Study links chocolate and depression

Yglesias: Pushing for Filibuster Reform

3 clips from the movie are in the L.A. Times.

This layman can't understand this economic stuff completely, but it sure does seem interesting!

I'll avoid the temptation to hard on the police being the puppets of our corporate overlords (in this case, Apple) to note:

Gizmodo said Monday that California police raided the home of an editor for the gadget blog who revealed details last week of a secret next-generation iPhone prototype.

Gizmodo published excerpts from a search warrant that gave police permission to seize property from editor Jason Chen's home that was "used as the means of committing a felony" or "tends to show that a felony has been committed."

The search warrant signed by a local judge specifically authorized the seizure of "printed documents, images and/or notations pertaining to the sale and/or purchase of the stolen iPhone prototype."

See, I'm wondering where theft was involved. As far as we know, this prototype iPhone was left at a bar. Did somebody at Apple tell a fib?

Gizmodo also published a letter from a lawyer for its owner, Gawker Media, objecting to the raid on Chen's home and arguing that a "search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist."

Yeah, that's just what I'm thinking.

From my perspective, the most interesting and provocative modern questions around America's racial dilemma, like any societal dilemma, do not necessitate blame. To put it differently, I am not concerned about gender equality because I think I'm to blame thousands of years of sexism, I'm concerned about gender equality because it matches my moral center. Blame is irrelevant. In the context of race, the question isn't "Who is to blame for the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow?" it's "What, tangibly, can we do to counter its generational effects?"

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates

Today's blogosphere fad seems to be responding to "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game" by Henry Louis Gates, which appeared in the New York Times, so what the hell, I'll take a stab at it.

First of all, I won't mock the idea that slavery was a great crime that the U.S. got away clean with. 40 acres and a mule would have begun healing the birth wounds of this nation, but even that was too much to hand over to those of darker skin.

Instead it was decided to deny blacks access to justice in general, and courts in particular, long enough so that everyone directly profiting off the institution of slavery would surely be dead by the time blacks had a hope of collecting recompose. The decedents of the slave-masters would be able to say "hey, it wasn't me that did that! Why should I have to pay them anything?"

It's a dirty trick, but it's worked wonderfully. If the intent was to merely delay justice to the freed slaves, it worked behind it's instigator's wildest dreams, as the delay's ultimate result is that reparations are now and forever a political impossibility. If the citizens wielding all the power didn't deem it fit to set right their wrongs against the newly freed slaves, what hope do we have now?

Even if we put all that aside and decided to pay anyone who's the direct descendant of slaves, what would be pay them? Cold hard cash? Preferential treatment of some sort? Housing? Free education?

Do we exempt those eligible blacks from the taxes that would have to be paid to cover the costs of those reparations? What about Hispanics and other minorities? The logistics that need consideration are mind-boggling.

Even worse is what I see as being the conscientious man's main objection: if reparations of any sort were enacted, there's guaranteed to be a certain (and in my opinion, significant) amount of violence against the black minority. Social service programs like welfare lost popularity as it became seen as "a black thing." Anything so explicit in its intent to benefit blacks at the express expense of whites is tantamount to inviting ,at a minimum, rioting in the streets. And, I think, no shortage of bloodshed.

I've seen the folks over at NewsBusters shoot themselves in the foot, but this one is extra special, in that it's something I actually agree with, which means that maybe Mr. Noel Sheppard needed to think about this a little bit more (as usual). Here's the key bit from "Media Heresy: Bill Clinton Helped Cause 2008 Financial Crisis":

In the past 20 months, liberal media members have routinely blamed 2008's financial crisis on George W. Bush, Republicans, Wall Street, and greed.

Someone that has hardly ever been accused of having a hand in what led to the tumult is former President Bill Clinton.

As NewsBusters has been reporting almost since the crash began, it was Clinton who signed into law two key bills -- the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 -- that ushered in the malfeasance that almost toppled the world economy.

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999? Isn't that another name for the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act? They're dissing Clinton for signing a bill named after Senator Phil Gramm (Republican of Texas), Representative Jim Leach (R-Iowa), and Representative Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (R-Virginia).

In other words, Clinton co-operated with Republicans, and brought the American economy to it's knees.

"U.S. students suffering from Internet addiction."

Students? What about the rest of us?

This is sad:

There's a script to being a Republican these days:

• Vague homilies against government
• Nonsense talking points against taxes
• Vague homilies against socialism
• Nonsense talking point against Pelosi and Reid

But at 1:32 it's proof that these people are delusional. Taxes haven't been cut just because . . . people are protesting taxes? Shouldn't some evidence be motivating these people at some point?

If you ever get to check out Sabri Nehari, I highly recommend you try it, even if you don't like Pakastani food.

The frontier chicken is awesome. They can't make it spicy enough for me.

"Who's behind those embarrassing interviews with tea partyers?"

He's harsher on the left than I would have guessed, but I can't bring myself to totally disagree without getting into whether or not Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow represent themselves as journalists, and how much MSNBC undercuts Maddow saying she's not a pure journalist with their advertising.

The selective fatalism and optimism of libertarians perplexes me. When you talk about "free markets" and "free enterprise", the rose colored glasses come out and everything is fine, as any religious fervor insists it must be. But when you talk about the government, everything goes dreary and is doomed to failure, damn the evidence!

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is rife with such nonsense. Their blog post, "The Postal Service's Union Problem" is a perfect example. Tad DeHaven points to a recent GAO report which outlines the United States Postal Services recent problems, and proclaims "As mail volume falls, that’s where the USPS is headed [failure] unless we privatize it and deregulate postal markets."

The libertarian fantasy is so fatalistic DeHaven can't see the GAO's solutions to the USPS's problems don't imply that privatizing the whole kit and kaboodle is anywhere near necessary. My theory is that the problems the USPS faces are irrelevant: it's just an excuse to convince the public that it's a good idea to privatize it. You'll never hear a libertarian say that just because UPS or FedEx are having problems during an economic downturn, private corporations should just get out of the mail business.

So why should government?