Salon's Cary Tennis is one of my very favorite writers. He's on hiatus from his "Since You Asked" advice column there, where he's written quite movingly of his journey toward sobriety. Instead, he's been blogging about his cancer fight.

Now he faces an even bigger battle: one with Blue Shield, and he needs our help:

I've been recovering from cancer surgery and waiting for the insurance company to approve the next course of treatment, which is eight weeks of proton beam radiation therapy at Loma Linda Hospital in Southern California.This treatment is what my surgeon, Dr. Christopher Ames of UCSF, calls the standard of care for sacral chordoma.

Today I learned that the insurance company has denied the request for this treatment. Dr. Ames is a noted expert on spinal tumors. That's Ames in the ABC7 News video below -- taking four vertebrae out of a woman's neck and ... well, just watch the video. This is the guy who operated on me:

Dr. Ames says that 8 weeks of proton beam radiation therapy at Loma Linda Hospital is the standard of care and I believe him. So I called Blue Shield. They told me to fill out this grievance form.I put the grievance form PDF on my Web site, where you can download one, too. Maybe if a few hundred, or a few thousand, of these forms were filled out and mailed to Member Services Grievances, Blue Shield of California, P.O. Box 272540, Chico, CA 95927-2540, well ... maybe it would get some attention. Or maybe if you called (800) 424-6521, which is the number that people with grievances are supposed to call, maybe that would get some attention. On the back of the form are instructions about how to contact the California Department of Managed Health Care. Their phone number is 888-HMO-2219.

Sacral chordoma is a very rare cancer, and proton beam radiation therapy is not a well-known course of treatment. Plus it is expensive. So naturally an insurance company is going to carefully review a request for such treatment.

But Blue Shield wouldn't deny me needed care, would they?I don't want special treatment. I want the same treatment anyone else would get. I just want treatment.

Danny Goldberg writes a brilliant piece on Howie's DWT that explains the real reason Air America failed: There is no will to sustain left-wing media, talk radio or support the liberal blogosphere if it doesn't turn an immediate profit.

Right-wing millionaires realize that it takes years to develop any sort of model that works, but they also understand that making money isn't the point of their ventures. It's to get their messaging out to as many people as they can. And they are successful at it.

Danny Goldberg:

Conservatives believe in doing whatever it takes to promote their ideas. Richard Viguerie, viewed as one of the architects of the modern conservative movement, wrote a book in 2004 called America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media To Take Power, in which he explains how the right wing used talk radio among other tools. Viguerie stresses that conservatives understand that ideological change does not usually occur over night, that it takes patience and long term thinking to build a movement.

In the early nineteen seventies the Washington Post and New York Times were instrumental in helping expose the Watergate scandal and publishing the Pentagon papers. Conservatives felt that liberals had an advantage in setting the agenda because of the influence of New York and D.C. newspapers on the national media. In 1976 Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and it has lost money every year since, the total loss estimated to be more than half a billion dollars. In 1983, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon created the Washington Times, which has also lost money every year. Widely published reports place Moon’s losses at over $1 billion on the Times and other political media including a purchase the venerable wire service UPI. These money losing properties have put dozens of conservatively slanted stories onto the national radar screen, altered the framing of every important political issues, and nurtured virtually every right wing pundit who now thrive as TV talking heads.

More recently, Phillip Anschutz bought the money losing Weekly Standard from Murdoch and announced plans to invest in more conservative media and his fellow billionaire and former Republican Treasury Secretary Pete Petersen started a digital news service called The Fiscal Times.

The fatal flaw in Air America’s genetic code was the pretense that liberal talk radio was a great business opportunity, that progressives could have their cake and eat it too, do well by doing good, make big salaries and get a great return on investment while also pursuing an ideological agenda. Sure, every once in awhile political media like Michael Moore’s movies or Rush Limbaugh’s radio show will make money, but for those interested in influencing public opinion, media in all venues is vital whether they make money or not.

Air America scared the bejeezus out of conservatives because they had never seen such an enterprise before, and that's why Bill O'Reilly and Fox News did everything they could to smear them from its inception. The liberal blogosphere is in the same predicament. We need funds to survive and thrive and with a bad economy, ad revenues dropped off considerably in 2009.

Readers do not like to see ads on blogs for the most part, but without them C&L could not survive and neither would most highly trafficked sites. Corporations are sinking in millions of dollars at a shot to try and buy their Internet real estate while most of us already have an imprint that is virtually impossible to find without multimillion-dollar investments.

I'm trying to create jobs for bloggers and expand to combat the right-wing noise machine, but I need help to do it. I've talked to several very wealthy people who are really incredible progressives and they don't know that much about blogs even at this point in time. The wealthy progressive collective needs to rethink their positions on media and invest in the future for America if the left will have a chance to match the right. We are seeing an erosion of the MSM right in front of our eyes, and men like Coors, Murdoch and Scaife are just giddy, as news turns into opinion warfare and propaganda instead of real investigative journalism.

Air America should have had access to funds regardless of what type of profit margin it made in its first few years. In a short time, Air America delivered our country a U.S. Senator named Al Franken and a superstar TV anchor named Rachel Maddow, and the right loathed the prospects of even more good voices for the left having a place to develop. In time the influence of progressive talk radio on the AM dial would far outweigh their profit projections.

Murdoch and Moon and many others on the far right easily write off the NY Post and Washington Times as a necessary investment to the future of the conservative movement. I understand that those same resources aren't available to the left -- after all, the right tends to be about the preservation of money and power -- but there is certainly enough to build radio infrastructure and help fund the liberal blogosphere that had so much to do with the resurgence of the progressive movement in 2006 and 2008. We really need the same commitment from the left. I hope the powers that be are listening.

My friend MB got a call Saturday night from one of her law school professors, whose about-to-be-adopted children were stranded in an orphanage in Haiti. (The paperwork was finalized, all that remained was the trip home to America.)

They were out of food and water, and some of the children's caretakers were killed in the quake. Apparently people had broken into their compound and taken their supplies, the situation was dire and the adoptees' mother was frantic. MB was trying to help. "I knew you'd have some ideas," she said.

First I forwarded the information about the orphanage to a state department official via Twitter. Then I thought about other options. "If that was me," I told MB, "I'd be contacting all my local TV stations to get them to do a story, hoping the national media picked it up."

"Good idea," she said, and got off the phone to call her professor.

After a Sunday afternoon conference call with U.S. officials working in Haiti, I called to tell her the U.S. State Department was aware of the 500 orphans who were in the process of adoption, they'd already evacuated 150 to the United States and five more were leaving Sunday afternoon. She said she'd pass the information along.

Yesterday morning, on my way to the dentist, I called MB to see whether she had any news. She'd called a friend who called a friend and yes, a Fox News crew went out to the orphanage and they got some food and water delivered to the orphans. Yay, Fox News! (You probably won't hear me say that again anytime soon.)

"But we still have to save the internet," she said, worriedly.

"MB, what are you talking about?" (She's a classic Cancer and just isn't happy unless she's worried about someone.)

Well, MB's husband Eric (one of the founders of the blogging Koufax awards) works for CORE, and used to work for ICANN, the international internet body. Seems that there are three people in Haiti capable of running the country's internet NOC (network operations center), and two of them died in the quake. The one remaining operator, Reynold Guerrier, told Eric the center was using a generator - and running out of fuel. Thugs were trying to break into the facility to steal what they could, but the NOC operator held them off. He was very worried about his wife and children, but told Eric he'd stay if someone would get his family out of the country.

MB was frantic. "I've called everyone I can think of, but everyone's closed for the holiday," she said. "I'm contacting people to try to get a number, just any kind of back-door contact. I wrote Joe Trippi to see if he can help."

"I'd try congressional staffers," I said. "What about Stoller? He works for Alan Grayson."

"I used to have his number. Who would have his new number? Would Natasha?"

"Yeah, either her or Chris," I said.

"Okay, I'll call her," she said.

When I came home from my lawyer's appointment, I called her again. She'd spoken to Darcy Burner, who told her either Sen. Patty Murray or Sen. Maria Cantwell would call her in 15 minutes. And Natasha had passed all the info onto Matt Stoller.

And somebody, somewhere had gotten through to someone and the State Department had at least delivered some fuel to keep the internet hub running. (Yay, again.)

"I thought the internet was set up so that if one part went down, another part patched in," I said, a little whiny. (I only got four hours' sleep the night before and after spending the morning in the dentist's chair, I was just plain cranky.)

MB explained that if the router wasn't up and running, there was nothing to patch into. "And a lot of utilities, like the electrical system, run off the internet," she said. "So they won't be able to get back up without it." Oh.

So anyway, a bunch of dedicated people have been working very, very hard (not me - I didn't work that hard at all, I'm an idea person) to save orphans and the Haitian internet, and they all deserve a round of applause. Nice work, people! Smoochies to MB and everyone who helped her save the world.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (471)

PLAYS: (1244)

(h/t Heather)

Chris Matthews went on a rant against the 'netroots" yesterday when he was talking to John Heilemann from the New Yorker, saying that we're not real Democrats who vote and all we do is back-seat bitching because we're criticizing the LieberCare sellout health-care plan.

Think Progress:

When Heilemann noted that the “Democratic left” has been “trashing the health care bill” this week, Matthews said that those people were part of the “netroots” and not “regular grown-up Democrats”:

MATTHEWS: I don’t consider them Democrats, I consider them netroots, and they’re different. And if I see that they vote in every election or most elections, I’ll be worried. But I’m not sure that they’re regular grown-up Democrats. I think that a lot of those people are troublemakers who love to sit in the backseat and complain. They’re not interested in governing this country. They never ran for office, they’re not interested in working for somebody in public office. They get their giggles from sitting in the backseat and bitching.

I started blogging in 2004 because I was passionate about returning America to the great country it was before conservatives got their hands on the government in 2000 -- and it was because of the phony justifications that media elites like Chris Matthews sat back and used to persuade Americans to back such an outrageous position like the Iraq war that drove me into online activism.

We don't do anything? Really?

Atrios helped expose Trent Lott's love of Strom Thurmond back in 2002, which rocked the political world.

Macaca, anyone?

There are many excellent PAC's out there, but Blue America PAC/a> has raised over a million dollars since we started to do some governing, as we helped many great progressive politicians get elected like representatives Alan Grayson and Donna Edwards and Sen. Jeff Merkley, just to name a few.

The netroots have exposed FOX News to be the propaganda arm of the GOP when the MSM stood idly by and let them disseminate as manyLuntz-polled press releases masquerading as news as they could.

I've been asked to run against Jane Harman in CA-36, but I've held off making a decision until the New Year is upon us. We've broken stories like the scandal over the Bush administration firing seven U.S. Attorneys, and have given an incredible amount of content to news networks because of our commitment for truth. And they use that content without crediting many of us, while sneering at us as dirty f&*@king hippies.

I can go on and on, but I'll debate Chris Matthews anytime he wants about the things we actually do and we actually achieve in the real world -- both inside and outside the Beltway, too.

There's only a few hours left. I love all the contestants, but if you have a minute please vote for Digby to win the Air America Cruise contest. She's my friend and a great thinker for the progressive movement.

She's behind by a lot of votes because she has never written anything about the contest, so click on through and vote.

(h/t Jamie)

Founder of the blog Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson has seen the light and decided he can no longer support the right wing of his party and makes no bones about why:

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.) Read on...

Conservatives like Kathleen Parker and Christopher Buckley found out that leaving the GOP fight club isn't easy -- and Johnson will undoubtedly suffer the same fate. Johnson is taking major heat for his defection, which comes as no surprise, and comments like these at Politico merely prove his point.

I don't expect to see Charles Johnson showing up with Code Pink at any war protests any time soon, but this post covers much of what C&L and other progressive blogs have been saying about the GOP for some time now. It is a dying party that has been taken over by religious extremists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and worse.

Johnson's observations about his party mirror those of my conservative friends and family...well, most of them. They wonder what happened to their party and where they belong in the political spectrum.

I agree with Nicole Belle who wrote backstage - "I don't want him on the left. But it's nice to see someone on the right injecting a little sanity into the discussion."

F*&king FTC Major league A-Hole Richard Cleland. I'm sure most of our readers heard about the "new" rules the FTC just came out with which to me are there just to punish bloggers.

The new guidelines declare that bloggers who fail to disclose "material connections" to companies they write about can be fined … wait for it … up to $11,000 per violation! Wow. I asked Julie O'Neill, a former staff attorney for the FTC in the New York regional office and now an attorney in the Washington, D.C., office of law firm Morrison & Foerster, about these new rules.

My first question was whether these rules are fair, rational and enforceable. Julie responded: "I do think that they are rational in the sense that they apply the rules traditionally applied to advertising to new media, but I don't know whether the FTC has completely considered the practical ramifications. For example, the revised guides say that a company that provides a blogger with a free product to review should both require the blogger to disclose that he received it for free and have procedures in place to monitor his postings for compliance."

As you can see from this short excerpt, the FTC has NO F*&king clue what they are doing.

As you know C&L does write a lot of book reviews. Hell, we even host book chats with the author. I happen to get many books sent to my PO BOX and many of them I just don't have time to review or read in a timely fashion so they go up on one of my shelves and I eventually try to get to them. It gets even more ridiculous than I first thought.

Daily Kos reads an interview with Richard Cleland and the stupid burns :

The more I read this interview of an FTC staffer by book blogger Edward Champion, the more the stupidity burns.
{}
You can return it. Most book reviewers (political bloggers included) get dozens, if not hundreds of books, per year. The logistics and expense of such a thing makes it impractical. Strict adherence to this edict would essentially kill non tradmed book reviewing. And why?

If, however, you held onto the unit, then Cleland insisted that it could serve as "compensation." You could after all sell the product on the streets.

So stupid. You "could" sell it. If you buy a gun, you "could" shoot someone with it. If you purchase a knife, you "could" stab someone. If you open up a stock trading account, you "could" engage in illegal insider trading. If you buy shoes, you "could" use them to run away from a crime scene. If you get an accounting degree, you "could" use that knowledge to launder drug money. If you take a job at the FTC, you "could" become a blithering idiot.

Read the whole post because my eyes are burning in my head. As Duncan often says:

To be clear, I have no problem with transparency and disclosure, I have a problem with Blogger Ethics rules and laws which don't apply anywhere else in the universe for no rational reason.

WTF, am I supposed to burn a book after C&L reviews it. If I write a TV review on a great, great show called Dexter, will they search my house to see if I got a copy from Showtime? Here it is.

I think Dexter is an excellent show. Go and buy or rent all the seasons because the 4th one just started. Are they f*&king kidding me? The FTC can kiss my Italian ass. And that is that.

UPDATE: I see the FTC is rethinking their position now.

FTC Reassures Bloggers - Big Brother Isn't Watching

In a conference call for reporters today, Engle aimed to set the record straight after a flurry of news stories (not to mention blogs and tweets) about the FTC's new advertising guidelines that were, as she put it, "all wrong."

"We are not going to be patrolling the blogosphere," she said. "We are not planning on investigating individual bloggers."

Continue reading »

My good friend Digby finished 5th in a Villager poll on who influences what we discuss.

NationalJournal.com's panel of top political bloggers was asked to join in the survey of National Journal and The Atlantic Wire about which columnists, bloggers and television or radio commentators most helped to shape their opinion or worldview. No one received votes from both the left and right; of the 63 people named in total, only 23 appeared on more than one of the 22 combined ballots.

Related coverage: See how National Journal's panel of 375 Political and Congressional Insiders responded.

LEFT-LEANING Total points

Paul Krugman 23

Rachel Maddow 16

Frank Rich 13

Bill Moyers 11

Digby 9

RIGHT-LEANING Total points
Charles Krauthammer 27

Rush Limbaugh 24

Mark Steyn 18

Jonah Goldberg 11

Eugene Volokh 9

UPDATE: As a side note, I used to be on the National Journal's voting list, but didn't have time to vote on all their polls so I didn't cast a vote or her total would have been higher. She is the best and the brightest writer we have in the liberal blogosphere and even if you do not agree with all her takes you can be sure that she's always thought provoking. Bravo Digby.

My friends and family of the right wing persuasion have finally figured out to take me off their distribution lists for those viral emails that circulate about the internets. It was a lesson hard taught, because I felt obliged to obsessively research the facts and then reply to those emails, systematically destroying the wingnut talking points. You humiliate those wingnuts enough times, and they take you off their email lists.

Now, not everyone has the OCD to research and debunk these talking points, nor the need to be so...well, frankly, confrontational. So for people like that (you know, the ones much nicer than me), Media Matters has created an action site just for you. In it, they take some of the common viral emails--and then write responses to them, debunking the lies and very politely suggesting that the sender might want to use that gray matter lodged in his noggin for more than regurgitating Hannity. (I paraphrase, of course)

For example:

From: XXXXX@aol.com
To: XXXXXXXX@hotmail.com
Date: Saturday, August 01, 2009 6:18 AM
Subject: Fw: Senior's death warrent

SENIOR DEATH WARRANTS:

The actress Natasha Richardson died after falling skiing in Canada. It took eight hours to drive her to a hospital. If Canada had our healthcare she might be alive today. We now have helicopters that would have gotten her to the hospital in 30 minutes. Obama wants to have our healthcare like Canada's and England's.

In England anyone over 59 cannot receive heart repairs or stents or bypass because it is not covered as being too expensive and not needed.

I got this today and am sending it on. If Obama's plans in other areas don't scare you, this should.

Please do not let Obama sign senior death warrants.

Everybody that is on this mailing list is either a senior citizen, is getting close or knows somebody that is.

Most of you know by now that the Senate version (at least) of the "stimulus" Bill includes provisions for extensive rationing of health care for senior citizens.

The author of this part of the bill, former senator and tax evader, Tom Daschle was credited today by Bloomberg with the following statement.

Bloomberg: Daschle says "health-care reform will not be pain free. Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them."

If this does not sufficiently raise your ire, just remember that Senators and Congressmen have their own healthcare plan that is first dollar or very low co-pay which they are guaranteed the remainder of their lives and are not subject to this new law if it passes.

Please use the power of the Internet to get this message out. Talk it up at the grassroots level.... We have an election coming up in one year and nine months. We have the ability to Address and reverse the dangerous direction the Obama administration and it allies have begun and in the interim, we can make their lives miserable.

Lets do it! If you disagree, don't do anything.

Media Matters' response?

Continue reading »

It's a little weird to be posting a video that features me as a guest on Washington Journal (not the least of which is that it feels really creepy to be writing headlines about myself), but here goes: On the whole, I'm happy with my segment. (Except for the part where I missed it that a caller said he was reading the Drudge Report to find out what was going on. Arggh. I missed a real opportunity to educate him.) You can see Parts 2 and 3 here. (Thanks, Heather!)

My favorite part is when I call Glenn Beck "a nut, we all know he's a nut".

Among the other issues addressed: Netroots "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" Syndrome; healthcare reform; network news "analysts," and much more. Enjoy!

And as I mention in the closing segment, I was interested to note that the Republican and Democratic callers all expressed similar concerns.

This was a really productive discussion, and I'd like your thoughts. I talked to Joe Sestak (PA-7) backstage after the panel, and he told me he would start a netroots caucus in the House - and one in the Senate if he wins!

It might be the answer we're looking for; I believe it could increase our clout. (As someone commented to me today, politicians just don't care about one $20 contributor. But a few thousand $20 contributors can inspire a little respect.)

If Joe makes this happen, it means that caucus members will keep us informed on developments regarding our issues, and it means that caucus members who respond to our issues will be able to use us as attack dogs more effectively. This seems like a win/win.

Rep. Pat Murphy (PA-8), an early netroots favorite who joined the Blue Dogs after his election, approached me in the convention center lobby and quite enthusiastically told me if there was a netroots caucus, he would "absolutely" join. (This was after I first called him a few rude names over his FISA vote. But we kissed and made up, and he told me to call him any time I had a question. The fact is, he is with us on most of the issues. Not all, but most.)

All I know is months ago it was conventional wisdom in D.C. that the Democrats couldn't take the House, that candidates shouldn't talk about the war, and that the best way to try to win 15 seats was to throw all your money into about 18 of them, and hope for the best. In the end, that's not how it played out.

- Duncan Black, better known as Atrios, in November 2006.

Who boosted Howard Dean into the chairman's spot at the DNC, bringing his successful 50-state policy to fruition in last year's presidential race? The netroots did. And in 2006, who showed Rahm Emanuel that yes, we really could take control of Congress? We did.

Whose fundraising pushed the Democrats over the top in the 2008 Senate races? Ours did. Whose activist base drove the publicity, turnout and dollars in last year's presidential primaries and general election?

Duh.

So what have we accomplished? The war goes on and we've even expanded our presence in Afghanistan. The Bush-era encroachments on civil liberties have not only been embraced by a Democratic president, the Democratic Congress gives him their blessing. And with the goal of universal healthcare within tantalizing reach, we have Blue Dog Democrats - Democrats! trying to obstruct it.

Enough of kicking the Blue Dogs. What can we do to be more effective? Where did we go wrong?

Continue reading »

The conservative blog Townhall has a new spokesperson making the rounds these days and well, let's just say she is the perfect example of today's GOP -- and all that is wrong with it.

Jillian Bandes has been quite busy lately, appearing on CSPAN Friday morning, then showing up on MSNBC where she got very nasty with our dear friend Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, who laid waste to her right wing talking points.

Bandes is no stranger to controversy. As Tintin at one of my favorite blogs, Sadly No! reminds us, she made her bones by publishing an anti-Arab screed in her college newspaper:

Hey, whatever happend to Jillian Bandes? You remember her. She was the redneck wingnut who was fired from the UNC student newspaper after writing a column advocating that all Arab guys should be strip-searched at airports and that this wasn’t really a problem because Arab guys would enjoy getting all “sexed up” at the airport. Well, guess what? Jillian is now a contributor to the Clown Hall blog — “Where racism isn’t just a philosophy, it’s a job qualification!”

The other great thing about blogging for Clown Hall is you can recycle some stale wingnut blogger talking points from weeks ago, lard it up with ridiculously hyperbolic language à la Atlas’s Jugs, make up some shit to throw in for good measure to get the half-witted Town Hall commentariat all torn up, offer it up as your own blog posting, and then call it a day, collect your wingnut welfare check, and get to happy hour at Smith Point by mid-afternoon. Which is pretty much what Jillian did with her latest offering: “Michelle Obama’s Veggie Garden Is Poisoned!” Read on...

Here are a few snippets from Bandes' anti-Arab rant:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.

They’re some of the brightest, kindest people I’ve ever met. Tragically, they’re also members of an ethnicity that is responsible for almost every act of terror committed against the West in the recent past....

Stay class...never mind. If you don't have Sadly No! bookmarked, you should. It's a guilty pleasure of mine that never disappoints!

Okay, so it wasn't exactly earth shattering, but it sure was informative. Bill Clinton invited a group of bloggers (including yours truly, in the blue jacket) to meet with him this past Monday at the Clinton Foundation offices in Harlem.

Many of the bloggers who were there already wrote about it in great detail here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, but now you'll get my version.

First of all, he was late. (Since Bill Clinton is always late, this was not exactly a surprise.) So we all sat there in his conference room, plotting to turn the whole thing into an impassioned plea for health care reform. Well, that didn't work out because we didn't have enough time - because he was running late. (Did I mention Bill Clinton is always late?)

When he walked into the room, he went around the table and shook everyone's hand. When he sat down, he mentioned the main reason we were there: to talk about the Clinton Foundation.

He said their large corporate donations had fallen off after the market crash, and he was hoping to reach out to small donors through blogs. He talked about what a difference they'd made with worldwide AIDS: "Almost no one will die from lack of medicine for AIDS." But, as he pointed out, there's simply no formalized health care system in much of the world, and some AIDS victims are still dying because of that. That's one of the things the Foundation is doing: building networks of clinics in remote villages.

They also work on climate change and honest to God, he sounded more passionate than Al Gore (which I didn't expect). He was really enthusiastic about the just-announced energy retrofit of the Empire State building and the projected 40% energy reduction from putting in new windows.

"I know solar and wind energy sounds sexy," he began, but quickly made his case for concentrating on retrofits not just to save energy, but as global economic stimulus.

"For one billion dollars, you can get 870 jobs at a coal plant. For one billion dollars spent on solar, you get 1850-2000 jobs. For one billion on wind energy, 3300 jobs. But for a billion spent on retrofitting, 6000 jobs," he said.

"The low-hanging fruit is in fixing the buildings."

Continue reading »

I posted about the NRO's Ed Whelan outing of a liberal blogger that wanted to remain anonymous because he couldn't take any criticism, but now sees the errors of his ways.

My Apologies to Publius

On reflection, I now realize that, completely apart from any debate over our respective rights and completely apart from our competing views on the merits of pseudonymous blogging, I have been uncharitable in my conduct towards the blogger who has used the pseudonym Publius.

Earlier this evening, I sent him an e-mail setting forth my apology for my uncharitable conduct. As I stated in that e-mail, I realize that, unfortunately, it is impossible for me to undo my ill-considered disclosure of his identity. For that reason, I recognize that Publius may understandably regard my apology as inadequate.

The damage is done, but at least an apology came. I hope this sends a message to others (it seems to be a right-wing thing) who similarly believe it's just fine to dig up personal information and expose it about a blogger (or anyone else) who wishes to remain unknown, just because they have a mean streak and a taste for vengeance. It's not fine. You listening, Michelle?