By Melissa Harris-PerryMarketplace, Thursday, March 17, 2011
Next week is the one-year anniversary of the landmark health care legislation. But the fight over health care policy continues.
Commentator Melissa Harris-Perry says the debate is still missing one critical element.
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: The fights are about budgets, government authority, and ideology. Surprisingly absent from the rhetoric and positioning is any serious conversation about the actual state of American health.
Just listening to the politics, one might easily conclude that most Americans enjoy good health, reasonable access to care, and multiple options for high-quality treatment of illness and injury. That's not the case.
Every morning, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's press secretary sends to Barbour's staff and other allies a list of press clippings, along with a daily compendium of birthdays, historical notes, and jokes -- which have recently included humor on the topics of the disastrous Japan Tsunami, Janet Reno's gender, and the Cambodian genocide.
In Friday's email, for instance, press secretary Dan Turner emailed that on that day in 1968:
Pentagon cancer research budget comes under scrutiny
For almost 20 years, the Defense Department has been the recipient of more than $3.6 billion for cancer research. The programs have never been requested in any presidential budget, and are outside the Pentagon's traditional mission of battlefield medicine and research.
Nonetheless, lawmakers, prodded by grass-roots lobbyists, have annually added in the money as part of the appropriations process.
With Congress now debating a spending bill for the remainder of this fiscal year - and both parties calling for budgetary restraint - lawmakers have shown no inclination to curtail this spending. The Senate Appropriations Committee recently added $250 million to the fiscal 2011 Continuing Resolution for cancer research.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/35080/?a=f
The U.S. Armed Forces are heavily burdened by the financial and tactical costs of transporting fuel to the battlefield. This July, in an effort to address the problem, the United States Marine Corps will deploy a pair of diesel generators coupled with powerful batteries to frontline troops in Afghanistan. The hybrid power systems should cut by 50 to 70 percent the amount of fuel needed to generate electricity, according to the manufacturer, Earl Energy of Portsmouth, Virginia.
The generators that U.S. military camps currently use operate inefficiently because they need to handle ocassional peaks in demand. "You may have a 10-kilowatt generator that at any time is only producing 1.5 kilowatts of power to satisfy its load," says Doug Moorehead, president of Earl Energy. "So you are wasting 8.5 kilowatts of power that you aren't storing for later use," he says.
The rejected plan called for trains that would have traveled as fast as 170 mph on the 85-mile route from Tampa to Orlando.
Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and several members of Congress have written to LaHood seeking the funds for rail upgrades along the congested Northeast Corridor.
A study from the CDC.
A swath of the Deep South and Appalachia has emerged as the U.S. “diabetes belt,” researchers find. County-by-county mapping shows that the highest rates of diabetes cut two paths — one strung through Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, and another running eastward from Louisiana through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
- NOAA: The agency with primary responsibility for warning Americans about natural disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes would lose more than $117 million in funding, including $99 million in cuts to its Operations, Research, and Facilities activites.
-U.S. Geological Survey: The agency that monitors earthquakes and other seismic activities will see more than $7 million cut from its Surveys, Investigations, and Research budget.
-Community Policing Services: The resolution would slash more than $194 million in local law enforcement funding, cutting $25 million from a campaign to crack down on methamphetamine abuse. $2 million would be cut from the Office of Nation Drug Control Policy federal drug control programs and $91 million from juvenile justice programs.
-Environmental Protection Agency: The EPA, a frequent target of the new GOP Congress, would see $217 million cut from its budget. Other agencies engaged in environmental protection and land conservation would lose more than $173 million from their budgets.
-National Forest Service: More than $50 million would be cut from the NFS, including $6 million to fight forest fires.
-Small Business More than $64 million would be cut from agencies and
The latest controversy involving NPR executives and Thursday Congressional hearing into the "radicalization" of Muslim Americans are two topics under discussion in the weekly Tell Me More"Barbershop." Host Michel Martin speaks with author Jimi Izrael, civil rights attorney Arsalan Iftikhar, columnist Ruben Navarrette and the journalist Kevin Williamson
The world's largest bond fund has moved out almost entirely from US debt and into that of emerging markets and corporations, Pimco's Bill Gross told CNBC.
Speaking a day after news broke that Pacific Investment Management Company had dumped its Treasurys holdings from its $236.9 billion Total Return fund, the Newport Beach, Calif.-based firm's managing director said it would return once yields grew more attractive.
"It's not a question of dissing the United States or questioning the credit of the United States, but simply a maturity reflection," Gross said. Treasurys are "mispriced relative to the inflationary environment and the growth we see ahead and there are better alternatives in order to capture yield."
