Obama: health care should be a right for every American

Obama: Well, I think [health care] should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills -- for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that.

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And when Sen. McCain says that he wants to provide children health care, what he doesn't mention is he voted against the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program that is responsible for making sure that so many children who didn't have previously health insurance have it now.

Good luck with that, guys.

Senior Senate Republicans finessing their election-year message are emphasizing that their conference will need to take a more prominent role on healthcare to win sorely needed independent voters in their uphill bid to retake the majority in 2008.

This is the same group of Republicans that twice upheld the president's veto of children's health insurance and specifically attacked two children whose families lobbied for the bill.

Republicans were worried that too many middle class kids might get covered.

Mitt Romney makes the case for government health care

Unintentionally, I think:

Romney was quick to say he didn't like Clinton's plan and opposed taxes to pay for health care subsidies, but that prompted a question from another patron. "Who's paying for the subsidies if it's not the government of Massachusetts?"

"We found it cost us more money to be giving free care out at hospitals than to help people buy their own private care," Romney said.

That, of course, is one of the standard arguments for the single payer system. It's cheaper to pay up front than to pay for the uninsured when they show up at the emergency room.

The leading cause of death among black women

During Tavis Smiley's Democratic debate, the candidates were asked about AIDS and it's affects on black America:

MS. MARTIN: [Y]ou can imagine how disturbed we were to find out from the Centers for Disease Control that African-Americans, though 17 percent of all American teenagers, they are 69 percent of the population of teenagers diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.

SEN. CLINTON: You know, it is hard to disagree with anything that has been said, but let me just put this in perspective. If HIV/AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.

According to the CDC, HIV is the leading cause of death among black women 25-34 years old, and is a significant killer of all American women. Black women are 23 times more likely to contract AIDS than their white counterparts.

Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for white women 25-34.

American women as a whole are most likely to die of heart disease or stroke.

Michael Moore: pinko or capitalist genius?

Rob at SayAnything is outraged at Michael Moore's comments that he doesn't mind if people share copies of his movie "Sicko" over the internet.

“I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people,” said Moore when asked about pirating. “I make these books and movies and TV shows because I want things to change, so the more people that get to see them the better, so I’m happy when that happens. I think information and art, ideas should be shared.”

Rob has decided to call Moore's bluff by posting the whole thing on his site, expecting to be shut down immediately. I don't know if Moore's legal team have shut it down or if Rob's bandwidth is saturated, it wasn't playing when I dropped by.

But Rob shouldn't be so quick to outrage over Moore's "fair use" policy. After all, Moore is already a wealthy man, and there are lots of examples of good capitalists who give away things of value and still make a fortune. Google is the most obvious case in point: most of us use their services daily and never pay a dime for it. And the company’s founders are now billionaires.

Everyone with a blog also knows that they can get set up on a server for free - and I don’t see Blogger or Wordpress going out of business any time soon.

And of course, we’ve been listening to music free over the radio for about a hundred years now.

The key is to find something of greater value than the original item. Michael Moore is willing to trade some revenue for a bigger reputation and a bigger audience (including people like Rob and his readers who would likely never have paid to see a Michael Moore film in the first place).

Now if the music industry ever stops suing it’s customers for pirating music, they might figure out how to make some money on the internet, too.

h/t MvdG

Barack Obama officially declares his candidacy

Poverty, Health Care, Energy Independence are central themes in his announcement speech.

All of us know what those challenges are today - a war with no end, a dependence on oil that threatens our future, schools where too many children aren't learning, and families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can. We know the challenges. We've heard them. We've talked about them for years.

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For the last six years we've been told that our mounting debts don't matter, we've been told that the anxiety Americans feel about rising health care costs and stagnant wages are an illusion, we've been told that climate change is a hoax, and that tough talk and an ill-conceived war can replace diplomacy, and strategy, and foresight. And when all else fails, when Katrina happens, or the death toll in Iraq mounts, we've been told that our crises are somebody else's fault. We're distracted from our real failures, and told to blame the other party, or gay people, or immigrants.

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Let's be the generation that finally tackles our health care crisis. We can control costs by focusing on prevention, by providing better treatment to the chronically ill, and using technology to cut the bureaucracy. Let's be the generation that says right here, right now, that we will have universal health care in America by the end of the next president's first term.

Let's be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil. We can harness homegrown, alternative fuels like ethanol and spur the production of more fuel-efficient cars. We can set up a system for capping greenhouse gases. We can turn this crisis of global warming into a moment of opportunity for innovation, and job creation, and an incentive for businesses that will serve as a model for the world. Let's be the generation that makes future generations proud of what we did here.

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We can work together to track terrorists down with a stronger military, we can tighten the net around their finances, and we can improve our intelligence capabilities. But let us also understand that ultimate victory against our enemies will come only by rebuilding our alliances and exporting those ideals that bring hope and opportunity to millions around the globe.