| Blues Power!
I heard Ehrenreich interviewed on "Uprising", a local morning show on Pacifica's KPFK (interview here), and the host, Sonali Kolhatkar, mentioned a recent study from New South Wales on the benefits of negative thinking. Reuters had this to say:
SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) - Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.
The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.
"Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world," Forgas wrote.
"Our research suggests that sadness ... promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations."
For the study, Forgas and his team conducted several experiments that started with inducing happy or sad moods in their subjects through watching films and recalling positive or negative events.
In one of the experiments, happy and sad participants were asked to judge the truth of urban myths and rumors and found that people in a negative mood were less likely to believe these statements.
People in a bad mood were also less likely to make snap decisions based on racial or religious prejudices, and they were less likely to make mistakes when asked to recall an event that they witnessed.
The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style."
No bad moods on the right! Snap judgements? You Betcha! More NY-23s On The Make!
TPM reports:
In the wake of the NY-23 right-wing revolt, could the GOP be on the verge of seeing even more challenges from the activist right? Some recent developments suggest that the natives are getting restless.
• NRCC chairman Pete Sessions is being challenged in the Republican primary by David Smith, a corporate financial analyst. Smith told us that the NY-23 mess was not a factor in his decision -- but it should help him in attacking Sessions: "It's nice to have my opponent in the national news for a bad reason at the same time I'm announcing my candidacy."
• Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) is facing a Republican primary challenge from Jason Sager, a currently unemployed audio-visual engineer. Sager specifically cited Brown-Waite's having campaigned for Dede Scozzafava, the moderate Republican nominee in NY-23 who ultimately dropped out of the race and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, as a reason for his challenge.
• In WI-08, currently held by second-term Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen, former Niagara Mayor Joe Stern announced earlier this week that he'll be running against Kagen -- as a conservative independent: "Neither party is truly serving my interests at this point. I'm not going to run as a Republican, but I'll be happy to take their money." This is a historically Republican district -- indeed, it was the home region of Joe McCarthy -- but it has been moving to the Democrats in recent years, and Stern could potentially split the non-Democratic vote in a tight race.
Right now, they're being dismissed. Next week, who knows?
Big Pharma's Flu Flim-Flam
Oh, and speaking of Barbara Ehrenreich, earlier in the week, I wrote a Quick Hit, "Joe (You Lie!) Wilson Blames Obama For Vaccine Shortage -- After Voting Against Vaccine Funding". But Joe's no vote was ineffective. OTOH, Susan Collins managed to cut almost $900 million for H1N1 vaccine production from the stimulus bill. But the real problem with the vaccine shortage isn't either of these two misanthropes, according to Barbara Ehrenreich, who just so happened to get her PhD in cell biology. As she explains on her blog, it was big Pharma, which in turn gave the Obama Administration a bad case of undue optimism:
In July, the federal government promised to have 160 million doses of H1N1 vaccine ready for distribution by the end of October. Instead, only 28 million doses are now ready to go, and optimism is the obvious culprit. "Road to Flu Vaccine Shortfall, Paved With Undue Optimism," was the headline of a front page article in the October 26th New York Times. In the conventional spin, the vaccine shortage is now "threatening to undermine public confidence in government." If the federal government couldn't get this right, the pundits are already asking, how can we trust it with health reform?
But let's stop a minute and also ask: Who really screwed up here -- the government or private pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and three others that had agreed to manufacture and deliver the vaccine by late fall? Last spring and summer, those companies gleefully gobbled up $2 billion worth of government contracts for vaccine production, promising to have every American, or at least every American child and pregnant woman, supplied with vaccine before trick-or-treating season began.
According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy."
I'm shocked! shocked! that private corporations would deliver substandard health care! Ehrenreich goes on to note:
As for Big Pharma, the truth is that they're just not all that into vaccines, traditionally preferring to manufacture drugs for such plagues as erectile dysfunction, social anxiety, and restless leg syndrome. Vaccines can be tricky and less than maximally profitable to manufacture. They go out of style with every microbial mutation, and usually it's the government, rather than cunning direct-to-consumer commercials, that determines who gets them. So it should have been no surprise that Big Pharma approached the H1N1 problem ploddingly, using a 50-year old technology involving the production of the virus in chicken eggs, a method long since abandoned by China and the European Union.
Chicken eggs are fine for omelets, but they have quickly proved to be a poor growth medium for the viral "seed" strain used to make H1N1 vaccine. There are alternative "cell culture" methods that could produce the vaccine much faster, but in complete defiance of the conventional wisdom that private enterprise is always more innovative and resourceful than government, Big Pharma did not demand that they be made available for this year's swine flu epidemic. Just for the record, those alternative methods have been developed with government funding, which is also the source of almost all our basic knowledge of viruses.
October Surprise Lessons Still Timely
At Consortiumnews, Robert Parry has a recap of the 1992-93 October Surprise investigation, which ended up as an intentional coverup, supposedly ensuring that the nation would "look forward, not back" in a "spirit of bipartisanship":
Despite Republican denials about any secret pre-election 1980 dealings with Iran - and the anger that the allegations drew from influential neoconservatives in the Washington press corps - a House task force was created to examine the case, although without much enthusiasm and mostly with an eye toward debunking the suspicions.
By November 1992, especially after President George H.W. Bush lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton, the task force's determination to proclaim the Republican innocence had solidified. The Democrats would be in control of the White House and Congress and were looking forward to bipartisan comity.
However, after Bush's electoral defeat, the floodgates that had long protected the Reagan-Bush team gave way. To the dismay of the task force, evidence of Republican guilt poured in.
The new evidence was so powerful, including multiple corroborations of secret Republican meetings with Iranians behind Carter's back, that task force chief counsel Lawrence Barcella saw no choice but to extend the investigation several months and to rethink the planned debunking.
Barcella told me later that he approached Rep. Lee Hamilton, a centrist Democrat who was chairman of the task force, with a request to give the investigators three more months to evaluate the new evidence.
But Hamilton, who prides himself in coming up with bipartisan answers to questions that otherwise might spur partisan conflict, said no. He ordered Barcella to wrap up the probe and to continue with the planned debunking
....
Another irony of the falsified October Surprise history was that Hamilton's wished-for bipartisanship never materialized. The Republicans pocketed the Democratic readiness to cover up for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush - and then launched a partisan war against Bill Clinton.
To this day, now 30 years after Iranian radicals seized the American hostages, the real story of what happened and how the Republicans manipulated the process remains mostly unknown. |
Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out, 
