Reading the news after this horrible election makes a person say ...one "OH MY GOD" after another... Below are several articles I copied from the New York Times. Carolyn
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sickening Quote of the week...  Do you believe this...??? like this bozo hero is going to save bozo Bush from ugly and embarrassment .... Carolyn  

"It would have been messy, ugly and an embarrassment to President Bush, so I withdrew my name."
BERNARD B. KERIK, who was nominated to be Homeland Security secretary. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Test Finds Inaccuracies in Help Line for Medicare
By ROBERT PEAR Published: December 12, 2004
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - Medicare's toll-free telephone line, one of the main vehicles for disseminating information about new prescription drug benefits and drug discount cards, gives accurate answers less than two-thirds of the time, Congressional investigators say. In a test of the service, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, found that 29 percent of callers received inaccurate answers, while 10 percent got no answers at all. Use of the phone line is expected to soar in coming months as the elderly sort through a complex array of new insurance options and benefits. Discount cards, available since May, can significantly reduce drug costs. But many beneficiaries hesitated to sign up, saying they were puzzled by the multiplicity of options. A government Web site compares drug prices under various cards, but many beneficiaries say they are not adept at using computers and find the site difficult to navigate. In response, Bush administration officials say that beneficiaries can get all the information they need by calling 800-MEDICARE (633-4227). But the people who answer those calls are themselves often confused, the Government Accountability Office said, in an evaluation required by Congress under the new law. "We found that 6 out of 10 calls were answered accurately, 3 out of 10 calls were answered inaccurately and we were not able to get a response for 1 out of 10 calls," the report said. In another recent report, the accountability office found that Medicare provided even less accurate information to doctors who inquired about the proper way to bill for treating Medicare patients. In response to 300 test calls, the accountability office said, customer service representatives gave correct and complete responses to only 4 percent of the billing questions. About 54 percent of the answers were simply wrong, and 42 percent were incomplete or partly correct, it said. The toll-free number for beneficiaries received 16.5 million calls in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up from 5.6 million in the prior year. Federal officials encouraged people to call, but now cite the deluge of calls to explain why they were unable to give accurate answers. "We were faced with an unprecedented volume of calls about a new part of the Medicare program that required new training efforts and many new customer service representatives," said Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "We believe we responded as well as we reasonably could given the unique and demanding circumstances." The 800-MEDICARE line is run for the government, under contract, by Pearson Government Solutions, a unit of Pearson P.L.C., a $7 billion international media company based in London. The company publishes The Financial Times and sells books under such imprints as Penguin and Prentice Hall. David R. Hakensen, a spokesman for Pearson, said the federal government had told him not to discuss the quality of service. Dr. McClellan said the government had increased the training of customer service representatives so they would give more accurate answers. Employees of the accountability office placed 420 calls to the toll-free line. They posed six questions of the type commonly asked by beneficiaries. Each was asked 70 times. Medicare officials prepare scripts to answer questions about the program, which provides health insurance to 41 million elderly and disabled people. But federal investigators found that the telephone operators "did not seem to know enough" to choose the right script or did not understand it. Beneficiaries can obtain a credit of $600 a year with their discount cards if their incomes do not exceed certain levels ($12,569 for an individual). Callers who asked about the assistance got wrong answers 79 percent of the time. Many operators did not realize they had to consider the source of income, as well as the amount. Social Security benefits are counted as income, for example, but life insurance benefits are not. In another example, callers asked if Medicare would pay for power wheelchairs. The answer depends, in part, on whether a beneficiary has enough upper body strength, or "trunk strength," to propel a manual wheelchair. But a Medicare operator, confusing trunk strength with the size of a car trunk, "incorrectly explained that Medicare would cover a power wheelchair only if a beneficiary had adequate space to put it in the trunk of his car," the report said. 

This says it all... Trickle down Bozoism... CS

 ----- Social Security Reform, With One Big Catch
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS Published: December 12, 2004
WASHINGTON OF all the arguments being made to replace part of Social Security with private retirement accounts, few are more seductive and more misleading than the prospect of earning higher returns. Get ready to hear a lot about this next week, when President Bush is host for a two-day economic conference that is expected to focus sharply on Social Security.
Under the current system, investment returns from Social Security are "abysmal," Mr. Bush said in one recent speech, because the trust fund is allowed to hold only low-yielding Treasury bonds. Letting working people invest some of their Social Security money in the stock market would allow them to earn higher returns, giving them more money at retirement than they would have if they let the government do everything for them, the logic goes. It sounds like a no-lose proposition. According to the Social Security Administration, Treasury bonds can be expected to yield a real annual rate of return of about 3 percent. Equities, by contrast, can be expected to earn 6.5 percent. That assumption is crucial to arguments that personal accounts can reduce Social Security's long-term shortfall - which the government estimates to be at least $3.5 trillion. Most of the proposals to overhaul Social Security call for steep reductions in future benefits that would be offset by the higher returns people would presumably earn on their investments. Stephen Goss, the Social Security Administration's chief actuary, has endorsed the assumption of higher returns. In evaluating the major proposals for putting some payroll taxes into personal investment accounts, Mr. Goss estimated that even people who hedged their risk by mixing stocks and bonds could expect an average return of 4.45 percent. But that logic is as flawed as a perpetual motion machine. If it were true, the government could erase Social Security's entire projected deficit by selling bonds at 3 percent and buying stocks that yield 7 percent. Why doesn't the government do just that? Because higher returns are inseparable from higher risk. No risk, no reward. And if the goal is to enhance security, if people are to have a solid reason to expect a particular level of wealth at retirement, the risks have to be relatively low. "The entire argument is absurd," said William C. Dudley, chief United States economist at Goldman Sachs. "These returns weren't free. You are getting these returns precisely because you are taking on risk." To be sure, one of the biggest ways to reduce risk is to have a long time frame. People who invest at age 30 or even 50 have the time to ride out most of the ups and downs of the stock market. But there are no guarantees. According to Ibbotson Associates, which publishes data showing average returns over different periods, large-cap stocks actually suffered a loss of 1 percent, annualized, from early 1929 to the end of 1942. Granted, it is somewhat unfair to pick a time period that begins just before the great stock crash of 1929 and continues through the Depression. But many analysts contend that it is even more misleading to suggest that people should have complete confidence in their ability to earn above-average returns with no risk whatsoever. Surprisingly, the Social Security Administration actually goes further than that. In addition to relying on the premise that equities will yield higher returns than Treasury bonds, Mr. Goss of the Social Security Administration suggested that returns in the future might be even higher than those of the past. "A consensus is forming among economists that equity pricing as indicated by price-earnings ratios may be somewhat higher in the long-term future than in the long-term past," wrote Mr. Goss. "This is consistent with broader access to equity markets and the belief that equities may be viewed as somewhat less 'risky' in the future than in the past," he added. If investment funds or stockbrokers made that kind of claim, they would probably be breaking the law. In an interview last week, Mr. Goss acknowledged that many experts believe investment returns should be adjusted for risk and that the common proxy for a risk-free return is the real yield earned on Treasury bonds. The Social Security Administration's analyses do include lengthy disclaimers, noting that the projected returns are highly "sensitive" to what happens in the markets. But other government analysts take a much more conservative approach. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a former chief economist in President Bush's own Council of Economic Advisers, assumes that equities and bonds will earn no more than Treasury bonds. Strikingly, the White House's own Office of Management and Budget recently made the same assumption. The issue was not Social Security but rather the projected growth of assets in the railroad retirement trust. In evaluating the railroad retirement system, the White House budget office also assumed that investments would yield the same as Treasuries. BUT the more basic question is this: Should a rational person believe that Social Security's very real financial shortfall can be reduced just by shifting from bonds into stocks? Those who imply that stocks can promise higher returns without higher risk are essentially arguing that Social Security can be fixed with a huge exchange of paper. If that is the government's strategy, people should by all means push for the right to shift all their payroll taxes to personal accounts and invest the money in gold.
-----------------------------------------------------------
FRANK RICH
The Plot Against Sex in America Published: December 12, 2004
WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight zone. Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a spot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey" distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and "controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints." Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis. Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples. Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make "Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year.

  When I first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, it struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history. It was in the distant year of 1948 that Alfred Kinsey, a Harvard-trained zoologist, published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," a dense, clinical 804-page accounting of the findings of his obsessive mission to record the sexual histories of as many Americans as time and willing volunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The book stormed the culture with such force that Kinsey was featured in almost every major national magazine; a Time cover story likened his book's success to "Gone With the Wind." Even pop music paid homage, with the rubber-faced comic Martha Raye selling a half-million copies of "Ooh, Dr. Kinsey!" and Cole Porter immortalizing the Kinsey report's sizzling impact in a classic stanza in "Too Darn Hot." Though a Gallup poll at the time found that three-quarters of the public approved of Kinsey's work, not everyone welcomed the idea that candor might supplant ignorance and shame in the national conversation about sex. Billy Graham, predictably, said the publication of Kinsey's research would do untold damage to "the already deteriorating morals of America." Somewhat less predictably, as David Halberstam writes in "The Fifties," The New York Times at first refused to accept advertising for Kinsey's book. Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of "moral values" voters, we're back where we came in. Bill Condon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working on this project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any political climate. The film is a straightforward telling of its subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included, conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by Kinsey's most recent biographers. But not unlike Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back to an American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did at the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence. As for the right-wing groups that have targeted the movie (with or without seeing it), they are the usual suspects, many of them determined to recycle false accusations that Kinsey was a pedophile, as if that might somehow make the actual pedophilia scandal in one church go away. But this crowd doesn't just want what's left of Kinsey's scalp. (He died in 1956.) Empowered by that Election Day "moral values" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women.    "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of this Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates instantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day.  
It's back to the DARK AGES for us all...CS  ________________

_____________________________________
Keeping the Faith in My Doubt
By JOHN HORGAN Published: December 12, 2004 Harrison, N.Y. WITH the presidential election over and the holidays upon us - a religiously charged political season followed fast by the most religious time of the year in an overwhelmingly religious nation - unbelievers may be feeling a bit beleaguered. To cheer themselves up, they might visit the virtual home for a group called the (Please click link ) United Universists.   Founded last year by a few brave souls in Birmingham, Ala., the  Universism movement "denies the validity of revelation, faith and dogma" and upholds science as our most reliable source of truth. The Universists are asking atheists, agnostics and other infidels to join them in their effort to counter the influence of religious zealots in our culture. Since the recent election, the Universists have posed this question on their home page in large type: "Who will fight for the faithless?" Good question. Obviously neither major political party wants to associate itself too closely with unbelievers - and understandably so, given polls showing that Americans are even less likely to vote for an atheist for president than for a homosexual. But as an areligious person myself, I'm intrigued by the notion of unbelievers banding together to increase their political clout, perhaps by speaking out on issues like sexual freedom, abortion, stem-cell and cloning research, and prayer in schools. There are more of us heathens out there than you might guess. According to the Pluralism Project at Harvard, which tracks religious diversity in the United States, the number of people with no religious affiliation has grown sharply over the past decade, to as many as 39 million. That is about twice the number of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Episcopalians combined. Not surprisingly, a slew of organizations - including older ones like the Council for Secular Humanism and the American Atheists and newer ones like the Universists and the so-called Brights - are competing for the devotion of the godless. The Universists, who claim to have enlisted 5,000 members so far, are especially feisty and shrewd at self-promotion. In September they took to the streets of Birmingham to protest Alabama's ban on the sale of sex toys, and last week they organized an online chat with Sam Harris, author of the anti-religion polemic "The End of Faith." And yet I have no plans to sign up with the Universists or any other areligious group. First of all, I'm just not a joiner, more out of laziness than anything else; I avoid commitments that might jeopardize my sports- or sitcom-watching time. An organization for freethinkers - one of the Universists' self-definitions - also strikes me as oxymoronic, like an anarchist government. Isn't the point of being a freethinker eschewing categories like Satanist, Scientologist or Universist? I'm also disturbed that these areligious groups have exhibited the same sectarian squabbling that they deplore in religious believers. When Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and director of the Skeptics Society, was invited to speak at an atheism convention in Florida last year, some organizers objected because he is agnostic - a mere doubter of God's existence rather than a denier. Mr. Shermer has likened this hair-splitting to the dispute between Baptists and Anabaptists over whether baptism should take place during infancy or adulthood. At that same conference, two anti-religion educators also proposed that negative terms like "agnostic," "atheist," "unbeliever" and "skeptic" be replaced with the more upbeat "bright," which describes someone "whose worldview is naturalistic - free of supernatural and mystical elements." The term, which can serve as a noun or adjective, has been promoted by the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the biologist Richard Dawkins. Members of some other groups have reacted with annoyance to the Bright movement, no doubt seeing it as an intrusion on their turf. Defenders of the old standbys "atheist," "agnostic" and "secular humanist" complain that "bright" is self-aggrandizing - and the implied antonym, "dim," a tad demeaning. Critics of the Brights include the Universists, whose Web site also distinguishes Universism from (and not-so-subtly asserts its superiority to) atheism, deism, humanism, pantheism, transcendentalism and Unitarian Universalism. All this goes to show that even groups founded with the best of intentions - and what groups aren't? - usually become concerned above all with self-perpetuation, often at the expense of other groups with similar aims. My main objection to all these anti-religion, pro-science groups is that they aren't addressing our basic problem, which is ideological self-righteousness of any kind. Obviously, not all faithful folk are intolerant bullies seeking to impose their views on others. Moreover, rejection of religion and adherence to a supposedly scientific worldview do not necessarily represent our route to salvation. We should never forget that two of the most vicious regimes in history, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, were inspired by pseudoscientific ideologies, eugenics and Marxism. Opposing self-righteousness is easier said than done. How do you denounce dogmatism in others without succumbing to it yourself? No one embodied this pitfall more than the philosopher Karl Popper, who railed against certainty in science, philosophy, religion and politics and yet was notoriously dogmatic. I once asked Popper, who called his stance critical rationalism, about charges that he would not brook criticism of his ideas in his classroom. He replied indignantly that he welcomed students' criticism; only if they persisted after he pointed out their errors would he banish them from class. OF course we all feel validated when others see the world as we do. But we should resist the need to insist or even imply that our views - or anti-views - are better than all others. In fact, we should all be more modest in how we talk about our faith or lack thereof. For me, that isn't difficult, because I've never really viewed my doubt as an asset. Quite the contrary. I often envy religious friends, because I see how their faith comforts them. Sometimes I think of my skepticism as a disorder, like being colorblind or tone-deaf. Perhaps I'm missing what one geneticist has called "the God gene," an innate predilection for faith (although I'm skeptical of that theory, too). But skepticism has its pleasures; I like the feeling of traveling lightly through life, unencumbered by beliefs. Instead of banding together, maybe we unbelievers should set an example by going in the opposite direction. We should renounce all "isms" - that claim to speak for our most profound personal beliefs. Or rather, since we seem to be headed in this direction anyway, each unbeliever could create his or her personal ism, perhaps with its own name. Since Universism is taken, I'll call mine "Horganism." You can revile it, admire it, or ignore it, but you can't join it.
John Horgan is the author, most recently, of "Rational Mysticism."    Ok here's my take on the personal ism thing.  CS

EXISTENCE-ISM
 
ex·is·tence-ism  n. 1. The fact or state of existing; being. 2. The fact or state of continued being; life: our brief existence on earth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then again, maybe anti-Bozoism

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 I believe there were only two groups that the average Bush voter could fit into.....

1. The stupid, ignorant misinformed goose category(or)
2.  The well-off, greedy, materialistic heel group…

(If you voted for Bush and do not belong to either of these assemblies, then you must be an alien from another planet, because the Bush Bunch certainly didn't conceal their true nature.)
)

I just came across this little quiz (I know too late) but sadly, it sure reinforces my theory about the Bush voter. Carolyn
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The 5 Question Bush/Kerry Election Quiz
Not sure who to vote for? We can help! (snarkcake) Just write TRUE or FALSE next to each of the sentences below.

1) ______ My family makes more than $200,000 a year (the top 1%).
2)_______ A member of my family works for / are a major stockholder in one of the following businesses: big media, defense, oil/energy, or any company that has received a no-bid contract in Iraq.
3) _______ I think Al Queda has been neutralized as a threat to the United States because since 9/11 we have done everything we can to fight them.
4) ______ I think that record deficits (debt), high unemployment and creeping inflation are signs of a strong, well-managed economy.
5) ______ I believe George W. Bush showed excellent leadership by invading Iraq and he has communicated a clear plan for Iraq’s future and America’s military deployed there.

Now add up your answers. ____ True ____ False
If you answered most questions TRUE, then you should vote for George W. Bush. You are one of the lucky few benefiting from his policies.
If you answered most questions FALSE, then you should vote for John Kerry. You should look after your own best interests. George W. Bush sure isn’t.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PleaseJoin

ALL HATS AND NO CATTLE

Welcome to Democracy Corps
Click Below If You Dare
Scary Picture came true