So I finally got a number out of my old doctor’s office for what it would cost to be seen without insurance: $125.
Then I called the doctor’s office down the street, the one I really wanted but didn’t take my insurance. Office visit: $40.
Now how much is that in chickens?
I am shocked that such things would happen!
Rachel Maddow pointed out last night that a teabagger who’s running for secretary of state in Kansas is claiming responsibility for “helping” Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, a white separatist, write the state’s controversial new immigration law. (He has since removed the claim from his website.) Lawyer Kris Kobach, a constitutional law professor, is counsel for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
From Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times:
As disturbing as the prospect is of a nativist extremist lawyer like Kris Kobach training all 881 of Sheriff Joe’s beigeshirts in immigration law, I have to wonder if it’s a sign that Arpaio’s throwing in the towel on the big Melendres vs. Arpaio racial-profiling lawsuit now underway in federal court.
What, was Stormfront’s Don Black not available? Maybe Tom Metzger could take a break from running his white nationalist Web site The Insurgent to come down and offer some words of supremacist wisdom to Joe’s benighted deputy dawgs. And don’t forget David Duke, that cat’s always lookin’ for a gig.
I kid, of course. Being an attorney, Kobach’s ties to anti-immigrant and extremist nativist organizations are far more white collar, with the emphasis on white. The controversial University of Missouri law prof acts as counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR, the notorious Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has tagged FAIR as a hate organization, and FAIR’s earned the title. Last April, when Kobach was announced as a minority witness before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during the committee’s hearing into the 287(g) program and Joe Arpaio, the SPLC hit the committee with a letter objecting to Kobach’s presence because of his ties to FAIR.
Regarding FAIR, the SPLC’s Mark Potok had this to say:
FAIR is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which publishes annual listings of such organizations. Among the reasons are its acceptance of $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a group founded to promote the genes of white colonials that funds studies of race, intelligence and genetics. FAIR has hired as key officials men who also joined white supremacist groups. It has board members who write regularly for hate publications. It promotes racist conspiracy theories about Latino immigrants. It has produced television programming featuring white nationalists.
And John Tanton, the man who founded the group in 1979, has a long personal history of associating with white nationalists. In a 1993 letter to Garret Hardin, a committed eugenicist who promoted pseudo-scientific ideas of racial purity, Tanton wrote candidly: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
The committee ultimately allowed Kobach to speak, but the stigma Kobach carries with him both precedes and hounds him. In 2004, he ran as a Republican against Democratic Congressman Dennis Moore, and was spanked hard, losing by 11 percent to Moore in Kansas’ largely Republican 3rd District. One reason he lost, according to The Road to Congress 2004 was because, “in general, Kobach was accused of taking money from a white supremacist organization, and the charge stuck.” Currently, Kobach is vying to be Kansas’ Secretary of State.
Kobach also served under Attorney General John Ashcroft during the Bush administration. There he developed a controversial program to profile Muslim men from certain countries and track them while in the U.S.
Kobach is also the proponent of a near-mystical nativist legal concept: that local cops have the inherent authority to enforce all federal statutes. Most legal scholars find this idea laughable, but folks like Arpaio and Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce cling to it like a life preserver in choppy waters.
Oh, this is gonna be interesting.
The depression, or the chocolate?
People who eat more chocolate are more likely to be depressed than people who eat less chocolate, a new study has found.
What isn’t clear, though, is whether people who were more likely to be depressed ate more chocolate in the study—or whether chocolate itself is linked to depression.
“It’s possible chocolate has antidepressant effects and that’s why they are eating chocolate,” said Beatrice Golomb, one of the study’s researchers and an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. “I think many of us believe chocolate consumption, at least in the short term, makes us feel better.”
Some research has suggested that chocolate, made from the beans of cocoa trees, has health benefits such as lowering blood pressure. But there has been little research involving mood.
Dr. Golomb and her colleagues looked at 931 adults who weren’t taking antidepressants and didn’t have known cardiovascular disease or diabetes. (The same group of patients was being screened as part of separate research involving cholesterol-lowering drugs.) The results appear in this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine.
Participants were asked about how many servings of chocolate they ate per week and then were screened for depression, using a questionnaire about mood, sleep and eating habits that doctors use to determine if a person might be depressed.
A depression-rating scale indicates whether a person should be referred to a psychiatrist for additional evaluation and possible treatment. Patients who score higher than a 16 on the scale are considered possibly depressed; those who score above 22 are considered likely to be depressed. People whose scores are 16 or less aren’t considered depressed.
The study found that “possibly depressed” individuals, who scored above 16, ate 8.4 servings of chocolate per month. People who weren’t depressed, scoring at or below 16, ate 5.4 servings of chocolate per month. Patients with scores higher than 22—or those most likely to be depressed—ate the most chocolate, with 11.8 servings a month.
Bruce Cockburn is such an amazing musician and songwriter, I once saw him play a bunch of instruments and effects pedals all at the same time. For some reason, you never hear his name mentioned when people talk about the best guitar players in the world. But I once read a story about a reporter asking Eddie Van Halen how it felt to be one of the best guitar players in the world, and he responded, “I don’t know. Ask Bruce Cockburn.”
Shelby Lynne:
Another earthquake, off Taiwan.
WASHINGTON — Goldman Sachs reaped “billions and billions of dollars” in profits by secretly betting in 2006 and 2007 that the U.S. housing market would crash, a strategy that conflicted with the interests of its clients who were still buying the firm’s risky mortgage securities, Senate investigators said Monday.
“The evidence shows that Goldman repeatedly put its own interests and profits ahead of the interests of its clients,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich, the chairman of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, told a news briefing. “I think they’ve been misleading to the country.”
The panel provided the first detailed glimpse of its findings from an 18-month investigation into the world’s most prestigious investment bank, setting the stage for a hearing Tuesday at which Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, and six other company executives will give sworn testimony.
Blankfein, in testimony prepared for delivery Tuesday, denied that Goldman orchestrated a “massive short,” or a series of negative bets that enabled it to ring up huge profits when the housing bubble burst and sank the nation’s economy.
“And we certainly did not bet against our clients,” he said.
The subcommittee’s findings bolstered reports in November and December by McClatchy that Goldman had marketed $57 billion in risky mortgage securities, including $39 billion backed by mortgages that it bought from lenders, in 2006 and 2007, without telling investors that it was secretly making bets on a housing downturn.
