What trade deals look like

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Looks like they’re voting on fast track today. Have you called your representatives yet?

(Washington, DC) – A new ad from the AFL-CIO and USW highlights how the loss of manufacturing jobs due to bad trade policy over the past 30 years has hit African-American populations especially hard in cities like Baltimore. The video makes clear that the battle over Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is not about politics: it’s about people like former steelworker Mike Lewis.

“One can’t help but be saddened. This was once called the ‘Beast of the East.’ We made the steel that went into the Golden Gate Bridge…” Lewis says in a video message to President Obama, while standing on the decimated site where he proudly worked for 32 years as a full-time crane operator. The dream of economic opportunities disappeared in August of 2012 when Mike and 2,100 of his steelworker brothers and sisters who permanently lost their jobs at the steel plant in Sparrows Point in Baltimore.

The union hall where workers came together for so many years in good times has been a food bank that many rely on to feed their families. The closing of the steel plant and other manufacturing plants started the economic downfall that many in the African-American community have not recovered from.
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Friday roundup

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

* So you know Scott Walker is trying to destroy his state’s higher education system — and doing a pretty good job, which leads me to believe he’ll walk away with the GOP nomination. Because they HATE smart people!

* The RNC and the Koch brothers are fighting over data!

* So it was the CIA who invented the term “conspiracy theory” to marginalize anyone who, you know, caught on.

* Efforts to expand voting rights got a shot in the arm from Clinton’s recent speech.

* OH, and hackers may have hit every federal employee, ever.

Hillary Clinton and the Times

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Targeted advertising

I knew it was bad (I mean, I do this for a living) but was kind of shocked when Media Matters put it all in one piece like this. (This is only half.) Yep, your librul media!

There were no claims that Romney’s possible run was rooted in an endless grab for power and fame. That kind of nonsense seems reserved exclusively for Clinton.

Is it really that bad? It is.

Here is a small sample of what readers of Times columns have learned about Hillary Clinton this year: She gives off an “atmosphere of hostility,” “exploit[s] our better angels and our desire,” is guilty of “shakedowns,” remains “suffused with paranoia and pre-emptive defensiveness,” and boasts “self-destructive instincts.”

Times columnists have noted Clinton recently wore a “forced smile, which was practically cemented in place,” she seems “like an annoyed queen, radiating irritation at anyone who tries to hold you accountable,” and she “doesn’t sparkle with honesty and openness.” Clinton, a flip-flopping “shapeshifter,” has been around so long the electorate “has known her since the Mesozoic era,” “she looked as if she was getting sucked into the past,” and to she wants become “grandmother of our country.”

Worse, Clinton’s surrounded by the “usual hatchets,” is known for her “lordly appetites and her queenly prerogatives,” “cannot emulate the wholesale allure of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama,” and there’s a “paranoid/legalese perspective that permeates” her.

More? Clinton’s “still idling on the runway, but we’re already jet-lagged.” She’s too often “hunkered down, steely, scornful and secretive.” She has a “reputation for flouting rules and operating in secrecy” and may have “a political death wish.”

And oh yeah, “she can’t figure out how to campaign as a woman.” That from Dowd, who has spent hercareer at the Times personally attacking Clinton.
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Last night in imaginary global warming

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

TAMPA

LOUISIANA

ALABAMA

TORONTO

News you can use

~ susie

Prilosec OTC, Walmart 8/2014 by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube. #Prilosec

I stopped taking these a couple of years ago, when I read about what they do to your intestinal bionome:

A novel data-mining project reveals evidence that a common group of heartburn medications taken by more than 100 million people every year is associated with a greater risk of heart attacks, Stanford University researchers reported Wednesday.

After combing through 16 million electronic records of 2.9 million patients in two separate databases, the researchers found that people who take the medication to suppress the release of stomach acid are 16 percent to 21 percent more likely to suffer myocardial infarction, commonly known as heart attack.

Because of its design, the study could not show cause and effect, but the researchers did claim that if their technology had been available, “such pharmacovigilance algorithms could have flagged this risk as early as the year 2000.”

The link between the drugs, known as proton pump inhibitors, and heart attacks is strong enough that “we do think patients should think about their risks and benefits and should discuss their risk with their doctors,” said Nicholas J. Leeper, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine and vascular surgery at Stanford, and one of the authors of the study. The danger extends to people outside high-risk groups, such as the elderly.