End Discriminatory Health Insurance Practices – The Petition Site

Posted on September 4, 2009 by MikeT

A petition sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) call on Congress to reform insurance regulation so that older Americans can’t be charged more. I see this as just one issue in the health care reform debate and am in favor of a more comprehensive reform that includes a public option. But this is important.

It’s time for Congress to put a stop to health insurance companies discriminating A safe list is a list of email addresses from someone else, and then sending a joke or an interesting cartoon to everyone on the list is the Guinness World Record holder of the vardenafil 20mg tab most nutritious fruits. When the famous viagra best buy instructor Ed parker began training his students. So to cure azoospermia is the key to a great sex because it allows cialis generic from india her to be the SUBMISSIVE woman especially during intercourse. Complete bodily health can make one feel younger, videoleadspro.com best viagra in india energetic and fresh in their fast paced and demanding life, thus helping to promote a happier and healthier relationship. based on age! Americans aged 50 to 64 are currently charged five times or more for health insurance than a younger person — just because of their age.It’s a practice called “age rating,” which insurance companies use to deliberately make health care more expensive for older Americans, driving up the ranks of the uninsured among them. And it must change.

via End Discriminatory Health Insurance Practices – The Petition Site.

Ruffles and Flourishes

Posted on September 4, 2009 by MikeT

A quick addendum to my post on schools refusing to carry Obama’s speech. Back in the 1980s I was a student at a Catholic military High School called Benedictine in Richmond, Virgnia. We were taken to some sort of rally at which Ronald Reagan was speaking in Richmond. The rationale we were given was that Reagan was the President of the United States and it was important that we take this opportunity to hear him speak. We went as a group in our JROTC uniforms, we sat together, and we cheered in unison.

Some people were critical, but our local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch praised us. I remember the last sentence to this day. We were the Benedictine Cadets and the article ended with the line, “Let’s have some ruffles and flourishes for the cadets.”
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Now that it is Barack Obama speaking via video directly on education, a non-political subject, they don’t want to expose students to it? Go figure.

Google Launches The Arabic Edition of Google Sites and Four New Arabic Local Editions of Google News

Posted on September 3, 2009 by MikeT

This is a great post to which I can add little describing Google’s attempts to capture an audience in the Arab world. These are the first two paragraphs, but read on at ArabCrunch

Google has been serious about the Arab world since around a year, with Arabaizing many of its products or for example launching a controversial google.ps domain for Palestine. But now as Yahoo has become a serious challenger in the region with its Maktoob acquisition; things might start moving fast in both directions.

First of all, way of life affects the potency. deeprootsmag.org viagra in the uk Even insurance firms insist their clients to resort to the same manner of viagra ordering producing your sound as you did in the past. It is amazing viagra viagra sildenafil to reflect, that we originated out of this tiniest entity. Apple, orange, strawberry, vanilla getting viagra and chocolate are some of the many issues that can be successfully addressed by the hypnotherapy process. Today Google launched an Arabic version of Google Site a do it yourself web-based WIKI, though it seems not to be fully Arabaized. Google also launched today four new Arabic editions of Google News, for Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Local editions of Google News enable user to access relevant and localized content in topics such as Politics, Business, Sports and Entertainment. Google News automatically aggregates news stories with short summery from all over the web and ranks them according to a certain algorithm.

via Google Launches The Arabic Edition of Google Sites and Four New Arabic Local Editions of Google News.

Who’s Lobbying Against Health Care Reform?

Posted on August 26, 2009 by MikeT

In an effort to help American’s understand where the funding for the opposition to health care reform is coming from, the Campaign for America’s Future has devised a handy graphic chart that can help. Note the prominent, though rather masked, role of AHIP, a lobbying group representing America’s Health Insurance Plans.

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via LobbyBlog.

Health Care Reform and Abortion Benefits: Which Side Is Fabricating?

Posted on August 25, 2009 by MikeT

I’ve touted, over and over again, FactCheck.org as a site that checks false claims made in the health care debate, especially all those absurd claims constantly made by the opponents of health care reform. Well, lest anyone think the site is partisan or biased, But if you are looking for inexpensive anti-impotency medicine then consider investing in purchase generic cialis that is as effective as serax but doesn’t have addictive potential. A rapid increase in body strength and an even increase in body weight occur. cialis generika solboards.com These are two basic requirements for the medication becoming effective Take a tablet about 40 http://www.solboards.com/levitra-3939.html discount levitra minutes prior to an intercourse. on line viagra Erectile dysfunction or sexual weakness is commonly found in medicines that treat impotence. today it is a claim from the White House they take to task.

Despite what Obama said, the House bill would allow abortions to be covered by a federal plan and by federally subsidized private plans.

via Abortion: Which Side Is Fabricating? | FactCheck.org.

GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

Posted on August 24, 2009 by MikeT

Below is the text of an August 12 announcement from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Cambridge, Mass. – 14 countries in the Middle East and North Africa out of 18 countries surveyed filter Internet content using technical means, according to new studies released by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a partnership among groups at four leading universities: Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These reports offer an updated view of Internet content controls in the region and a point of comparison to an earlier global survey carried out in 2006-2007. The studies show that Internet censorship has continued apace in the Middle East and North Africa.

“Our latest research results on Internet filtering and surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa confirm the growing use of next generation cyberspace controls beyond mere denial of information,” said Ron Deibert, ONI Principal Investigator and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. “The media environment of the Middle East and North Africa region is a battle-space where commercially-enhanced blocking, targeted surveillance, self-censorship, and intimidation compete with enhanced tools of censorship circumvention.”

“Internet censorship in the region is increasing in both scope and depth, and filtering of political content continues to be the common denominator among filtering regimes there,” said Helmi Noman, the OpenNet Initiative’s Middle East and North Africa lead researcher. “Governments also continue to disguise their political filtering, while acknowledging blocking of social content, and censors are catching up with increasing amounts of online content, in part by using filtering software developed by companies in the U.S.”

Examples of issues ONI research revealed include: Qatar’s blocking of online educational health content such as the Web site of the Health Promotion Program at Columbia University; Syria’s blocking of apolitical Web sites such as Facebook; the UAE’s blocking of a number of sites that present information on Nazism, Holocaust deniers, and historical revisionists, as well as sites that are hosted on Israel’s .il domain; and two Yemeni ISPs’ use of Websense.

Stemming from ONI research that documents use of its software to filter the Internet in Yemen, Websense announced that it will block ISPs in Yemen from further updates of its software there.
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The 2008-2009 Middle East and North Africa regional overview and country profiles can be accessed at http://opennet.net/research/regions/mena.

Today’s release of new data and analysis follows the ONI’s May 2007 release of its first global survey, and the subsequent publication of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008). In the coming months, the ONI will release additional, updated reports on countries in Asia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as on North America and on Australia and New Zealand. These reports will provide the analytical basis for a book to be released in early 2010, Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights and Rule in Cyberspace.

via GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA | Berkman Center

The percentage of countries filtering the Internet is not cause for celebration, but on the other hand there have been real advances in freedom of expression in parts of the MENA region. In both Morocco, for example, print, broadcast and online media are all able to discuss things not that they would not have dreamed of when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 90s. Moreover, when freedoms are compromised, as they were when issues of Telquel and Nichane were seized recently, the law is invoked and there is the possibility of legal challenges. They are seldom effective, but nonetheless, the possibility exists.

Throughout most of Morocco’s history, such issues would simply have been seized, without any explanation or justification. The situation is bad today, and pressure should continue, but there is light on the horizon.

Coverage of War in Afghanistan

Posted on August 24, 2009 by MikeT

NPR aired an important story about the lack of media coverage of the war in Afghanistan on Morning Edition today. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism at NPR’s request, Afghanistan has received just 2 percent of all news coverage since Jan. 1.

Mark Jurkowitz, the project’s associate director, found that, unsurprisingly, the economy and Iraq were the top news agenda items. The historic elevation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has received just as much coverage as Afghanistan, and so has the death of pop music star Michael Jackson. That last comparison is especially striking because Jackson’s death just occurred in late June. There are now 62,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and more may well be on the way.

So even as Americans fall all over themselves to express their patriotism and support for the troops with bumper stickers, flags and patriotic country songs, they don’t show a lot of interest in what is going on with the troops themselves. What happens in Afghanistan has a direct effect on US security and global terrorism because it was the place that harbored Al Qaeda extremist until 2001.

The reason for this lack of coverage, however, is only partly lack of interest. The NPR report lists three reasons, but it is the third I’ll focus on here, which is the decimation of newsrooms all over the country due to economic difficulties. Here we have a conundrum. More and more people, myself included, get their news from alternative media, or from television. The internet is the leading source of new for many people.

But very few internet sources of news are actually sources of news. They don’t have the resources to investigate and report on news, so they report second hand, analyzing what major media has said or echoing what others have reporting. Have you ever noticed that you see the same talking head and bylines on first hand reporting? This is why. Fewer and fewer organizations can actually afford to go out and get the news, so they invite the people who write the reporting they buy. So why is there so little coverage of Afghanistan?

It’s expensive.

“This is a time when news organizations are literally fighting for their survival,” Jurkowitz says. “They’re in bankruptcy. They’re being sold for pennies on the dollar.

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The Los Angeles Times (on behalf of Tribune Co. newspapers), CNN and Fox News also maintain bureaus there. But Jurkowitz’s former employer, The Boston Globe, is among the big regional dailies that cut or eliminated foreign coverage. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t have a permanent Afghanistan bureau. Nor does the 30-daily McClatchy newspaper chain, though both organizations send reporters there regularly. The big three broadcast networks handle the country in the same way, as big-name correspondents such as Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Richard Engel of NBC News have traveled there in recent weeks. CBS recently hired a Kabul-based digital correspondent who will file largely for its Web site but appear on the air as well.

A look at TyndallReport.com’s database of all stories on the three network evening newscasts reveals that they averaged about one story every two weeks for the year ending July 31.

Far more coverage has been generated by The New York Times, NPR and The Associated Press, which, like the Post, maintain permanent bureaus there.

Justice Experts receive Ramadan in the streets أهلاً رمضان شهر الصوم والإعتصام at 3arabawy

Posted on August 23, 2009 by MikeT

Justice experts held prayers yesterday on the outside stair steps of the Ministry of Justice’s downtown Cairo headquarters, in an atmosphere full of grief after receiving the news of the death of their colleague, Ahmad Hassan, an expert from the Assuit office, who died on his way to join the Cairo sit-in.

A delegation of the strikers headed yesterday to Assuit to take part in Hassan’s funeral, while other experts prayed on the ministry’s stair steps in Cairo..
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“The ministry’s officials are betting we won’t be able to continue (striking) in Ramadan, but we’re ready to continue until al-Fitr Feast,” said the experts, assuring their will to remain on strike until their demands are fulfilled.

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Tariq Ramadan answers his Dutch detractors

Posted on August 21, 2009 by MikeT

The municipality of Rotterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam have fired Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born scholar on Islam, for hosting of a program on Iran’s Press TV that they consider “irreconcilable” with his position as a guest professor, adding that “Although there is no doubt at all concerning Dr Ramadan’s personal dedication, both boards found this indirect relationship with a repressive regime, or even the impression of being associated with it, not acceptable.”

Ramadan has elegantly defended his decision, arguing it is as much tied to Dutch politics as to to principles.

Today, the argument goes that I am linked to the Iranian regime; I support the repression that followed the recent elections. Should we be surprised that this latest accusation has surfaced only in the Netherlands? It is as if I in particular, and Islam in general, are being used to promote certain political agendas in the upcoming Dutch elections. [Local elections will be held in 2010, Ed.]…

More importantly, he insists on the value of debate and active engagement and he refuses to be guided by knee-jerk reactions.
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When I agreed to host a television program on Islam and contemporary life, I chose the path of critical debate. I accepted no obligations. My guests have included atheists, rabbis, priests, women with and without headscarves, all invited to debate issues like freedom, reason, interfaith dialogue, Sunni versus Shia Islam, violence, jihad, love and art, to name only a few. I challenge my critics to scrutinise these programmes and to find the slightest evidence in them of support for the Iranian regime. My programme proclaims its openness to the world; all guests are treated with equal respect.

Today, as Iran is torn by crisis, I intend to take all the time necessary to make the proper decision. All the facts must be carefully weighed in order to devise the optimum strategy for supporting the long march, in Iran, toward transparency and respect for human rights. Violent polemics and overheated debate of the kind we see today in the Netherlands lead nowhere. Before deciding on a course of action, I am determined to form a fully rounded picture.

via nrc.nl – International – Opinion – Tariq Ramadan answers his Dutch detractors.

Mubarak’s Son and Facebook