Today I received this email from Amazon: "We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates."

Item Number 14 in the most recent Harper's Index (July 2009) is a pithy and tantalizing little factoid: Minimum number of Americans whose health care is paid for by taxes: 83,000,000. The cited source for this information is the US Census Bureau, and when I did a little hunting, I found this report, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006, published in August 2007 and prepared under the previous administration. It tries not to, but the report inadvertently makes an excellent case for publicly-funded health insurance: not only is it possible, we're already doing it.

It is very interesting that the American media is showing the protesters and doing extensive reporting on the election that is going on in Iran, however when hundreds of thousands were here protesting the war and the actions of the Bush Administration there was no media to be found. When people were protesting the war in Iraq and thousands would show up in Washington DC they would be lucky to get a still picture much less moving video on every cable channel. Where was the media's responsibility to the American people?

When Barack Obama ran for President, he pledged to fully repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) -- a mean-spirited piece of legislation that Bill Clinton signed in 1996 for crass political reasons. Obama says it's still his intent to do so, but has yet to follow up with any action. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department filed a brief late last week defending a constitutional challenge to DOMA. The brief did not merely argue against the lawsuit on technical grounds such as the plaintiffs' lack of standing, but advanced legal arguments that -- if pursued by the courts -- could greatly damage gay and lesbian rights.

My wife just got the fun surprise of finding out her APR on her Capital One MasterCard had just doubled. Customer Service told her it was because of the current economic crisis! Anyone else have this wonderful company?

Since 1955, Japan has been run, essentially without interruption, by the Japanese equivalent to the GOP, the "Liberal Democratic Party of Japan" (LDP). That now seems to be about to change.

At least according to the Department of Defense, which has been training its personnel that even peaceful protest is a terrorist activity: "Among the multiple-choice questions included in its Level 1 Antiterrorism Awareness training course, the DoD asks the following: "Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorist activity?" To answer correctly, the examinee must select 'protests'."

Despite losing an automatic recount, several court battles, and a whole lot of dignity and credibility, former Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota presses on with his delay tactics to keep Democrat Al Franken out of the Senate for as long as possible. It's been 225 days since the November 4th election, when Minnesotans first went to the polls to select their representative in the United States Senate. It's been another 165 days since January 3rd rolled around, when all of the other 2008 winners were sworn into office.

The default rate for credit cards is getting out of hand, and the reform bill should cause it to go even higher. In the end the thieving and greed of the credit card companies should discourage people from ever having a credit card. People will reject revolving debt in the same way that people who lived through the Depression rejected the stock market and banks. It will be a generational thing.

Saturday, I had the pleasure of seeing and participating in the Ed Schultz radio show live from the beautiful Montante Center. Ed is hitting the road to remind Obama and Congress of the promises they made during the last election, in particular, Single Payer Health Care and the Employee Free Choice Act. Ed and his audience (several hundred people many of who are auto and steel workers or union members and retirees) believe that Congress and the President are attempting to weasel out of passing these essential pieces of legislation.

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