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BOSTON GLOVE - Massachusetts Senate leaders indicated yesterday that they will push forward significant measures this year to control soaring health care costs in the state that probably will include caps on payments to hospitals and doctors.

Senator Richard Moore, an Uxbridge Democrat who is Senate chairman of the health care financing committee, said the Senate is committed to passing long-term solutions to control costs.

Last year, a state commission proposed radical changes to the way providers are paid, with the goal of slowing the rise in the use of medical services. It urged scrapping the current fee-for-service system and paying providers a per-patient annual fee, called a global payment, to cover all of a patient’s medical care._______________________________________________________

ABC NEWS - Even though Michigan resident Joseph Casias had a prescription from his doctor for medical marijuana, he was fired after a positive test for the substance by his employer, Walmart.

The news last November he'd been terminated was devastating for Casias, 29, who took great pride in his job, once earning the honor of Associate of the Year.

"It hurts. It hurts because I care. I care a lot about the store. I always wanted to make sure I do well," he told ABC News.

Casias started taking the medicine last June to cope with pain from sinus cancer and a brain tumor. He says the rare form of cancer causes him pain constantly and he almost died when he was first diagnosed._______________________________________________________

AL KAMEN, WASHINGTON POST - Know anything about housing? Ever live in a city? Well, get those bags packed, pronto! You can join Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan and Deputy Secretary Ronald Sims, plus three assistant secretaries and aides -- 14 HUD people in all. They will be joined by 20 officials from other government agencies for a spectacular week long event in, yes, RIO!

No, it's not Carnival. That was a few weeks ago. Three HUD advance people are down there helping to prepare for the mammoth United Nations World Urban Forum, the world's biggest meeting on cities. Some 16,000 folks are signed up. Don't delay. Online registration ends Thursday. . .

We're told it is somewhat unusual for the secretary and the deputy to be out of the country together, but Donovan, who is taking his family along, will be at the earlier part of the conclave so he can then enjoy a couple of days of vacation time. Sims, also taking his spouse, will be on hand for the latter part.

Former president Bill Clinton is going to be there, along with heads of state from Uganda, Bahrain and the Philippines, a U.N.-Habitat announcement says. "They will be joined by mayors, business and industry leaders from every continent, and many of the world's leading urban movers and shakers.". .

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not available, especially in this economy, to many urban dwellers. Remember, it's early fall down there, with temps this weekend expected to be in the mid-80s. Dress appropriately._______________________________________________________

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER - U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich waited until Democrats had won last November's health care reform vote before casting his ballot against it on the House of Representatives floor.

"I have doubts about the bill," Kucinich said. "This is not the bill I wanted to support. . . However, after careful discussions with President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, my wife Elizabeth and close friends, I’ve decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation."

Kucinich's move came after months of insisting he'd oppose the bill because it doesn't do enough to curtail insurance company abuses. Kucinich advocates bolstering Medicare and expanding its coverage to include all Americans.

But he acknowledged this morning that his choice now is to either vote "no" on principle, and thereby possibly block the biggest (though imperfect) advance in health coverage in decades, or compromise for the good of the estimated 30 million more Americans who could gain insurance.

"I have taken this fight further" than many other Congress members, Kucinich said, citing his two presidential campaigns in which he advocated universal coverage and his bill introduction and other attempts in the House to get single-payer insurance.

He told reporters that if they want to see first-hand the tough economic and health-care choices that many Americans face, they should "come to the 10th District in Ohio and you'll understand."

His recent criticism of the bill included a column he authored for last Sunday's Plain Dealer, in which he wrote:

"Even with the few modest improvements in the bill, the insurance companies will still have dozens of loopholes to deny care and continue to find ways to leave Americans with the unpayable bill."_______________________________________________________

BROOKLYN PAPER - Councilwoman Letitia James has filed a personal injury suit against an itinerant laborer after she allegedly injured herself walking into his legally parked truck.

The Democratic lawmaker, who makes $122,500 a year as the people's representative in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, is seeking an unspecified amount of damages for wounds she claims to have sustained on July 11 when she walked into a four-inch trailer hitch protruding from David Day's parked car.

James sustained "serious, severe and permanent [injuries] to her limbs and body" and "she will be caused to suffer . . . continuous pain and inconvenience," according to court papers filed last month in Brooklyn Supreme Court by James's attorney Robert Mijuca of the powerful law firm of Rubenstein and Rynecki._______________________________________________________

Some time ago, we ran as our lead article a piece by Rose McKinnon of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in which she argued:

(1) Health care should be universal. By this we mean that it should cover all people residing in the U.S. and should be treated as a right, rather than as a privilege; and must be available to all people, regardless of their ability to pay.

(2) Health care should be comprehensive, i. e., it must include all forms of care. It must not exclude drugs, dentistry, mental health care and preventive medicine, which to one extent or another, all of the present proposals exclude.

(3) Health care should be financed by national progressive taxation.

(4) Costs must necessarily be controlled in order to curtail the present run-away inflation; the increased demand a financing mechanism will generate would make such control imperative, and it is likely to involve government regulation of health-related industries.

(5) There should be no coinsurance, deductables, or other complex formulae, for these become almost incomprehensible, and tend to discourage the seeking of preventive care.

(6) The supply of health care must be expanded and a greater effort made to see that minority groups and women are adequately represented among every category of health care personnel; present imbalances must be eliminated.

(7) The health delivery system must be reorganized to produce a more efficient allocation of resources among and within geographical areas and cities.

(8) Last, and most important, there should be a much greater degree of public accountability within the health care system, so that those who receive care also have a part in controlling matters of quality, priorities and ethos (e.g.

The only thing unusual about the piece was that we published it almost forty years ago, in November 1971,when Dennis Kucinich was 24 years old. Those who consider him radical or impatient might want to bear this in mind._______________________________________________________

NY TIMES - A significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.

In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend's intense rains overwhelmed the city's system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.

State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.

For decades, these systems - some built around the time of the Civil War - have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.

In many cities, residents have protested loudly when asked to pay more for water and sewer services. In Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Sacramento . . . proposed rate increases have been scaled back or canceled after virulent ratepayer dissent._______________________________________________________

SAN MATEO DAILY JOURNAL, CA - More than 23,000 teachers and other school employees across the state have received notices of potential layoffs, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said yesterday.

Locally, a number of school districts issued pink slips while others have sent out notices of release to its temporary teachers.

More than 16,000 teachers in the state lost their jobs last year and another 10,000 classified school employees lost their jobs in the past two years._______________________________________________________

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RAW STORY - Obama's requests for transparency have apparently gone unheeded. In fact a provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush's final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies._______________________________________________________

We've tried it and it works great - TPR

NY TIMES - C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet. The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday._______________________________________________________

LA TIMES - Nearly 1 in 4 Californians under age 65 had no health insurance last year, according to a new report, as soaring unemployment propelled vast numbers of once-covered workers into the ranks of the uninsured.

The state's uninsured population jumped to 8.2 million in 2009, up from 6.4 million in 2007, marking the highest number over the last decade, investigators from UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research said.

People who were uninsured for part or all of 2009 accounted for 24.3% of California's population under age 65 -- a dramatic increase from 2007 driven largely by Californians who lost employer-sponsored health insurance, particularly over the last year.

Among those over age 18, nearly 1 in 3 had no insurance for all or part of 2009, the UCLA researchers found. The ranks of uninsured children also grew. The study was based on phone interviews from 2007, updated with current insurance enrollment data.

Adults over age 65, who are covered by the federal Medicare insurance program, were not included.

As a result of the insurance gap, many already strapped Californians have put off needed medical care and usually wound up crowding emergency rooms, receiving costly care on the run. Hospitals and insurance companies often pass on those expenses to customers with insurance, increasing the cost of healthcare and driving up rates for those who have coverage._______________________________________________________

ROBERT NAIMAN, COMMON DREAMS - Every American can shun Israeli consumer products such as Ahava Dead Sea Cosmetics, which operates a factory in the Israeli settlement of Mitzpe Shalem in the occupied West Bank. Every American can shun Sabra Hummus, half owned by an Israeli company that touts its support for the Golani Brigade, an Israeli army brigade notorious for human rights abuses. Every American can shun Motorola, which arms the Israeli military and has assisted in the construction of the illegal "apartheid wall" in the West Bank.

In addition, everyone who is active in a religious organization can agitate for local, regional, and national religious organizations to shun companies linked to the Israeli occupation, including by divesting investments from such companies. Folks on college campuses can follow the lead of students at Hampshire College who successfully pressed the college to divest from a mutual fund that invested in Caterpillar, Terex, Motorola, ITT, General Electric, and United Technologies_______________________________________________________

AOL NEWS - Thomas Jefferson received a demotion of sorts Friday thanks to the Texas Board of Education.

The board voted to enact new teaching standards for history and social studies that will alter which material gets included in school textbooks. It decided to drop Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.

According to Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes many of the changes put in place by the Board of Education, the original curriculum asked students to "explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present."

The Texas Board of Education is dropping President Thomas Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.

The new standard, passed at the meeting in a 10-5 vote, now reads, "Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone."

By dropping mention of revolution, and substituting figures such as Aquinas and Calvin for Jefferson, Texas Freedom Network argues, the board had chosen to embrace religious teachings over those of Jefferson, the man who coined the phrase "separation between church and state."_______________________________________________________

INFORMATION LIBERATION - To legally collect rainwater [in Utah] you must register with the state and buy a "standardized container." The government for decades has "owned the water rights" and deemed collection of rainwater a criminal offense. "The bill requires would-be harvesters to register online with the state and supply information about how much is to be collected and the collection point." reports Deseret News._______________________________________________________

LYNNE WILLIAMS, MAINE - I am suspending my [Green Party] campaign for governor, and will instead focus my energies towards building up our party by helping to elect Green Party candidates for state, county and local office.

Despite having more than 60 volunteer petition circulators working on my behalf, we fell short of the required 2,000 signatures from Green Independent Party members needed to put my name on the Party's primary ballot.

A major problem in my campaign's signature-gathering effort was physically locating the small number of Maine voters who are enrolled in the party. While Democrats and Republicans have several hundred thousand party members from whom to solicit a signature, the Green Independent Party has fewer than 30,000 active voters. In addition many of those on the list are young, urban and mobile – including a high percentage of college students – who had joined the party four years ago and have since moved.

Green Independents from 93 towns and all 16 counties signed those forms in the 74 days we had to gather the signatures. But it was slow going. It was hard to find our members. Not only had many of them moved, but with the popularity of cell phones, only about a third of them had listed phone numbers.

In addition to voter apathy, our volunteers were also initially diverted from signature gathering by the additional requirements of the Maine Clean Election Law, requirements imposed by the Legislature in 2009, after I announced my candidacy.

By eliminating the requirement that parties had to run a gubernatorial candidate in order to maintain party status, the Democrats made it clear they did not want a Green Party candidate for governor on the ballot this year, and furthermore, if there was a Green Independent candidate, they did not want that candidate to be well funded. So they also made major changes to the Clean Election Law that discouraged small parties from taking advantage of that process.

The most onerous change was the new requirement that Clean Election candidates for governor must raise $40,000 in private funding – under much stricter requirements than those imposed on traditional gubernatorial candidates – before qualifying for public funding.

Basically the Legislature said that in order to not be dependent on private campaign funds we had to be dependent on private campaign funds. It's an illogical requirement that flies in the face of the intent of the law and is disrespectful of the citizens who voted to approve the Clean Election Act.

On top of that, the $40,000 had to come from Maine registered voters, who are already paying for the Clean Election Act through their taxes. Thus those who supported the law were subjected to a system of double taxation if they wanted the law to work as intended. This was an irresponsible act on the part of the Democratically-controlled Legislature._______________________________________________________

This is what we call terrorism when it's headed the other way

NY TIMES - Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud._______________________________________________________

NY TIMES - When the state notified yoga studios that the instruction of yoga teachers would soon fall under government oversight, the last thing it expected was a battle.

But yoga teachers across a wide range of disciplines, from the body sculpting to the spirit enhancing, quickly began a coordinated attack on the state effort, hoping to avoid a cumbersome licensing process.

In the next 10 days, almost a year after the dispute began, Gov. David A. Paterson is expected to approve a bill that would exempt training programs for yoga teachers from state regulation under laws intended to provide oversight of vocational schools. . .

The issue arose in April, when the Education Department sent a letter ordering yoga studios to halt their intensive programs, known as teacher trainings, and apply for licenses - or face up to a $50,000 fine. The state requirements, which apply to vocational schools like those that teach hairdressers, massage therapists and computer technicians, are intended to create minimum standards and provide oversight of the institutions that teach students a trade.

VIRGINIA YOGA VICTORY_______________________________________________________

NY POST - A declassified FBI report from the Baltimore field office dated Aug. 25,1950 [states], "The BW [biological weapon] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950, have been indefinitely postponed.". . .

Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, confirmed that the LSD subway test did, in fact, occur in November 1950, albeit on a smaller scale than first planned. Little, however, is known about the test - what line, how many people and what happened.

The purported experiment occurred nearly a year before a more infamous August 1951 incident in the small town of Pont St. Esprit, in the south of France, when the citizens were hit by a case of mass insanity.

Over a two-day period, some 250 residents sought hospital care after hallucinating for no apparent reason. Thirty-two patients were hauled off to mental asylums. Four died. Mercury poisoning or ergot, a fungus of rye bread, was cited as the culprit. But ergot is also one of the central ingredient of LSD. . .

But with the CIA's most important records on such matters destroyed or cloaked in national security claims, it remains difficult to prove whether these purported subway tests occurred._______________________________________________________