Feed: Majikthise - AggScore: 65.9

Hats off to a blogger in the Netherlands who is cooking his way through Heston Blumenthal's bible of molecular gastronomy, the Fat Duck Cookbook. He's documenting his culinary odyssey at The Big Fat Undertaking. One of the early recipes he...

Eliminationist wags were selling bumper stickers that read "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8" on Cafe Press. Psalm 109:8 reads: "Let his days be few. Let another take is his office." The next verse is, "Let his children be fatherless And...

Like Jill, I've got misgivings about the provision in the senate healthcare bill that would defray the costs of reform by levying a 5% tax on cosmetic surgery. In practice, a plastic surgery tax would be relatively economically progressive. Plastic...

My first Newsweek story, on the Stupak Amendment, the senate, and what's next in the fight over abortion access under health reform.

This story should put the annoying "bad mommy" confessional genre out of its misery. Nothing can top this. Bad mommies have officially jumped the shark: An Arkansas mom allegedly allowed a police office to taze (link fixed) her 10-year-old daughter...

The IRS finally figured out that the fundamentalist flophouse on C Street owned by the secretive Christian group known as "The Family" is a dorm. Until recently, the C Street home for legislators avoided paying property taxes by claiming to...

Newsweek used this photograph of Sarah Palin as this week's cover shot. The headline reads, "How do you solve a problem like Sarah? She's bad news for the GOP--and for everybody else, too." It's a damned good question, and I...

A little known provision in the House health care bill would require the $1 billion continuing medical education (CME) industry to disclose more about what it's teaching the nation's doctors:

Ken Silverstein on the widespread phenomenon of lobbyists writing talking points and even whole statements for members of Congress: (A few years ago I found that the lobby firm of Patton Boggs had drafted a statement for Congressman Joe Barton...

• The Public Option Redux: Carper's Folly | Mother Jones While proponents of health care reform celebrate Majority Leader Harry Reid's pledge to support a public option in the Senate bill, nobody--journalists or politicans, advocates of opponents--seems to know what it is he's supporting. It's quite possible that the latest reincarnation of the public option will simply lay out one more circuitous route back into the insurance industry, with a a public entity subcontracting the actual insurance back to a private insurer in something akin to an outsourcing scheme.
• Trumka Sets AFL-CIO Standard for Real' Health Reform - Working In These ... As Congress haltingly moves toward approval of some version of health care reform legislation, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka warned today that “we cannot be in favor of reform for reform’s sake. This is the moment to make it real. The fight now is about what reform looks like.”
• Snowe: I'll Block The Health Care Bill If I Have To Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) has already suggested she won't vote for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's health care bill if it comes to the floor. Now she says she could prevent it from getting there in the first place.
• The Washington Monthly HOW LIKELY IS THE BLUFF?.... Marc Ambinder notes this afternoon that Senate Democratic leaders and the White House still think that Joe Lieberman, when push comes to shove, will join Dems and support cloture on health care reform. "They think he's posturing for power but will cave," Ambinder said.
• Nevada: A Good Place to be a Bad Boss Nevada is a good place to be a bad boss. According to a new report, you can flout safety rules and state inspectors just shrug it off. Even when workers die. Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a sweeping indictment of Nevada's OSHA program. Nevada OSHA (NOSHA) is one of over 20 state-level occupational safety programs supervised and partially funded by the federal OSHA.

• Say It Ain't Snowe -- In These Times I don’t get it. I know that’s the simplistic refrain of every 10-year-old, but I’m 33 and I mean it: I just don’t get it. Specifically, I don’t get why Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) — or any Republican senator, for that matter — is attracting so much attention.
• Democrats lost leverage early in health reform ... Democrats pushing for a government-backed insurance option as part of their health reform strategy are finding out the hard way that, by taking single payer health care off the table early, they have little leverage now to force a strong public plan.
• Harkin touts health reform advantages for small businesses “Right now small businesses are at the end of the tail that is wagged,” the Democratic lawmaker explained. “They don’t get the discounts and the rates and the coverage like the huge businesses do because they just don’t have the bargaining power, and they don’t have the choices available to them. So many small businesses in Iowa basically have one insurance company to deal with or maybe two at the most. So, therefore, there is no competition out there.
• Abortion Remains A Foil for Opponents of Reform All the sexual health-specific sturm und drang around the process of health reform over the past few months---hysterical anti-choice protests, representatives spreading false stories about school field trips to get abortion, and Senators pushing to restore abstinence-only funding---has resulted in a set of bills all of which that take roughly the same approach to abortion, what some call an “abortion neutral” approach.
• TPMDC: Pelosi Whipping House Health Care Plan--Including Robust Public Option As I reported last night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is making a concerted push to pass a health care bill with a robust public option. In previous weeks, Pelosi maintained that House health care principals were still hashing out whether the public option in the bill would pay providers Medicare-like reimbursement rates, or whether those rates would be negotiated by administrators.

• Dems vs. Insurance Industry, Round II " The Washington Independent Health insurance companies, for decades exempt from federal anti-trust laws, are exploiting that privilege to churn profits at the expense of patients, a number of Senate Democrats charged Wednesday. The lawmakers — including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — want to repeal the exemption as part of broader efforts this year to overhaul the nation’s dysfunctional health care system.
• Here's What to Tell Obama, Congress About Real Reform If you campaigned to elect Barack Obama last year, on the theory that doing so would deliver health care reform, it is likely that you will get a call next week. The president himself might even be on the phone. Obama is throwing his weight -- or, in this fit president's case, the proper word is probably "stature" -- behind a grassroots organizing effort to get 100,000 Americans to call Congress in support of health care reform.
• The Insurance Industry Can't Lose The health insurance industry’s double cross of Obama has created a storm of controversy. But it probably won’t amount to much. There's been a lot of talk about punishing the industry for its actions: through a barely conceivable threat to remove the industry’s antitrust exemption or by resurrecting the public option. Neither seems very likely.
• Harkin: Bill Would Include Higher Threshold for "Cadillac Plan" Tax Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told reporters on Friday that a public option will be included in the health reform bill ultimately signed by President Obama.
• Moderate Dems Blast Medicare Doc Fix Bill t’s not looking good for Senate Democratic leaders hoping next week to pass a $245 billion proposal to give Medicare doctors pay raises over the next decade. That’s because there are a number of Democratic moderates lining up to oppose the proposal because it’s not paid for. The New York Times points out this morning that at least two moderates, Sens. Evan Bayh (Ind.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.), are already vowing to vote against the bill.
• Franken speaks up for competition in the health insurance industry ... WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maine raised eyebrows when it sued the state for refusing to grant an 18.5 percent premium hike on 12,000 individual policy holders — an increase that would have generated a 3 percent profit margin for the company. Instead, Maine’s insurance superintendent granted a 10.9 percent hike — effective last July — which nets the company no profit on those policies. Reportedly, the superintendent reasoned that Anthem, a subsidiary of Wellpoint Inc., had profited enough in recent years — and paid out enough huge executive pay packages — that it could afford to break even for 12 months while patients struggle in the down economy.
• Nativism is Dangerous to Our Health Oct. 16, 2009 | Of all the wingnut mythology surrounding healthcare reform, nothing has stirred greater fury or louder denials than the suggestion that government might somehow provide insurance to America's undocumented workers and their families. "You lie!" screamed Rep. Joe Wilson as the President told Congress that his plan would provide no coverage to them. "No, we don't!" replied the Democrats, who scrambled to make sure that the undocumented are excluded by statute.

• Contrarian Double-X hires sociopath as friendship expert The self-proclaimed feminist website Double-X shrewdly hired noted sociopath Lucinda Rosenfeld to write its friendship column. This is precisely the kind of fresh, contrarian perspective we've come to expect from the Slate/Double-X brand.
• CNN Contributor Has Ties to Insurance Industry THE BLURRED LINES ON CNN.... Alex Castellanos' role as a CNN political analyst has been controversial for a while, but this might be the most serious incident to date: "Media Matters for America has obtained evidence that CNN contributor Alex Castellanos' political consulting firm, National Media, is the ad buyer for the insurance industry group America's Health Insurance Plan's (AHIP) new ad blitz attacking Democratic health reform plans. CNN has a responsibility to insure that Castellanos' obvious conflict of interest does not tarnish their future coverage of the health care debate."
• Petition: Fire Lucinda Rosenfeld from "Friend or Foe" A petition urging the editors of the self-proclaimed feminist blog Double-X to fire advice columnist Lucinda Rosenfeld for her columns trivializing the ordeal of a letter writer who reported being involuntarily drugged at a bar and abandoned by her friends.

• Baucus Committee OKs a Health Bill, But Not Reform
• Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth Featured in the Daily Pulse!
• BAUCUS BILL NOT MODERATE ENOUGH FOR LIEBERMAN.... Featured by Lindsay Beyerstein in the TMC's Weekly Pulse.
• My Insurance Company Says Being Pregnant Is An "Unhealthy Lifestyle ... Featured by Lindsay Beyerstein in TMC's Weekly Pulse.

• The face of war | Salon Life My second Salon cover story, an interview with photojournalist Nina Berman about her prizewinning portrait of a horribly burned Marine and his bride on their wedding day in small-town Illinois.