DAGGER 24 Hour News Service

An interesting discussion on American Healthcare will be taking place momentarily on BlogTalkRadio. The voices are those of fellow bloggers that got involved in politics in their own special way. The topics covered will include:

• Personal stories from nyceve's professional experiences in medicine
• nyceve's panel at YearlyKos 2007 in Chicago
• Michael Moore's Sicko
• recent actions by the American Cancer Society
• SCHIP
• the benefits and drawbacks of various solutions to the growing healthcare crisis in America
• and much more

I'll be listening, will you?

bernardpliers over at DailyKos takes a look at why the GOP has been so successful in steering the political debate in America.  The discussion that follows his posting is a good one and should be mandatory reading for all democratic campaign officials.

This is a prime example of where truth doesn't matter.  The human brain simply recognizes if it is heard a story before, not necessarily if it was a true or false story.  Anyone who has taken Logic 101 in college can probably relate to this discrepency. 

Last night Barry Welsh announced at YearlyKos that he is running to represent the 6th Congressional District of Indiana. Many of us found out too late about his last campaign to help. I talked about him on a few other sites and left links around the web. But that was just weeks before the election. This time he has taken full advantage of what the blogoshpere can offer him.

Read what his wife has to say about his announcement here.

For those of you reading this blog from afar I thought you'd like a little update on events.  The Democrats are looking strong, the Republicans are pathetically weak, Home Depot likes to support people that support terrorism (Bill O'Reilly) and view a customer expressing his concerns about their advertising expenditures as a waste of their time, YearlyKos is this week, I've been camping once and will be going again soon,  cleaned the house from top to bottom and am getting ready to move, Colbert still rocks, VS sucks, Derek Trucks still rocks, Roger Waters still sucks, it was a wet July, hoping for an average August, the moon is a little bit further from earth than it was yesterday, Gonzalez is ... well I won't even go there.

Peace

Here in the USA it looks as if our fearless leader is about to lower the axe on all of our troops in Iraq.  Buhdydharma over at KOS posts an excellent summation of where Bush stands on the Iraq Funding Issue.  It is in stark contrast to the way the issue has been portrayed in the Corporate Media.  By rewriting the corporate spin in such a way he allows the reader to truely see the issue for the first time.

I personally cannot understand how George Bush can be considered competent and responsible if he does this. If you start a war and then refuse to fund our brave troops in the field, is that not an incredibly heinous offense to decency and responsibility? Yet George Bush is about to abandon our troops in the desert by vetoing their funding.

Give it a try and see if I'm right.

link

I had the pleasure of seeing MMW at The Egg in Albany, NY tonight.  This is the second time I saw them perform in that venue.  They started the show by simply walking on and playing a long introductory improv piece that set the mood for the rest of the show.  Images of busy streets, golden roads, silver linings, purple robes, mudslides, torrents, lizards, latin dancers and funny looking frogs filled my head.  I realized that there is something very Joycean about MMW.  There is a tendency to revisit melodies but each time the melody is revisited it is ripped open and stuffed with even faster bass lines, quicker more intricate plays on middle eastern sounds mixing with American Indian sounds and back into bluesy jazz again.

It would seem that Medeski is taking a new piece of clay during each performance and begins shaping it into something that isn't quite jazz, rock, blues, world, jam, but it is resulting in something greater than all of those parts.

Wood is as fun to watch as he crawls all over his stand-up bass as he is to listen to.  His genius is more in omission.  I can see him mentally throwing out the notes he feels are not needed, his eyes bounce from the drums to the piano, then to the the eyes of the other musicians.  His style is becoming broader and smoother, even during the highly expressive superfast parts.

Martin's control of every aspect of his drums, squeaky toys, haunting bells, pieces of metal and other various noisemakers is spot on.  There was a moment when he was swinging bells back and forth below and around a microphone, it was as if he could see the sound waves bouncing around and new where the bells had to be in order to create the most interesting result.

Thanks MMW for turning a rainy night into Albany into such a memorable event.

studentloanjustice posted an informative article regarding student loans and how they are currently being administered.  He also just formed a political action committee! 

Senator Kennedy has publicly decried the fact that Student lenders like Sallie Mae can make far more money when students default on their loans than when they remain in good stead. Under current federal law, Lenders are guaranteed nearly full payment for loans that go into default. Furthermore, with the massive fees, penalties, and increased interest legally allowed to be attached to such debt, lenders such as Sallie Mae (who own collection companies) can, and do get a "second bite of the apple" through fees on collection of this massively inflated amount. In fact, Chairman Albert Lord said in the 2003 annual report that their record profits were attributable to penalties and fees collected from defaulted loans. This has caused astonishing, paralyzing and ridiculously cruel hardship on millions of students who couldn't afford to pay the original amount in the first place, but are strongarmed into paying the massively inflated amount.

source

Have you heard about Blackwater, it's ties to George Bush and the GOP?  There is a new book out that looks into Blackwater and it's mercenery army.  Based on the interview I saw with it's author it will be a very enlightening read:

Well, here we are a decade later, and it’s the most powerful mercenary firm in the world. It has 20,000 soldiers on the ready, the world’s largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships. It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's so-called global war on terror. And it’s headed by a very rightwing Christian activist, ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family was one of the major bankrollers of the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. He, himself, is a significant funder of President Bush and his allies.
source

Are "security measures" really security measures or a way to track, identify and influence worker's behavior?  Find out here.

Al Franken is considering running in 08 for Senate in Minnesota.  I think he should go for it.  He's not the most entertaining man on the radio, but he'd sure be one of the most entertaining Senators I could think of.  The other politicians could learn from him and realize perhaps that in order to have a sense of humor, you have to first know what's going on.  A looser approach is needed in Washington.  Not one that is focused like a laser on minute soundbytes but one that can sit back and take in the big picture and occasionally laugh at itself.

I took some time out to help a friend recuperate from surgery but I'm back and ready to go.  Please keep emailing us stories and stroy ideas.  So far you've all been wonderful on that front.  This site will soon become part of a larger network of sites, more news on that soon.