Tuesday's video diary by uniongal Michael Moore Rocked on Hardball!!! included a question by the Hardball interviewer, which, roughly paraphrased, went something like this:

When a rightwing dictator from a third world country, someone who has huge amounts of money that he's bilked from his country's people over the years, finds himself sick, where does he choose to go for treatment?  The U.S., right?

I believe this was supposed to be an argument in favor of the U.S. system.  But since the average person doesn't have unlimited funds to draw from, I thought I could offer a few comparisons, based on my real life experience with a few different systems.

Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh was shot outside Nagasaki train station Tuesday evening, around 7:50 p.m.  The gunman was identified as Tetsuya Shiroo, 59, a member of a yakuza gang who had been involved in past conflicts with city government over public construction works projects. Mayor Itoh died of his injuries after receiving emergency surgery at Nagasaki University Hospital.

Stories are here: Asahi news  and here: Japan Today

We're trapped in a slow motion train wreck.  Like so many other things - the quagmire in Iraq, for instance - the crash at the end seems obvious.  A few years ago an alternate energy system seemed possible.  Instead we ended up with a government that ignored the threat, pretended that if they didn't believe in science it wouldn't matter, declared a war to go after even more oil.  Half a trillion dollars later, we're not any closer to getting the Iraqis' oil - perhaps it's farther away than ever.  But we're still burning oil in ever increasing amounts.  And we're getting headlines like this one: Greenhouse gas 'threatens marine life'.  The story tells us:

it [CO2] is also rapidly turning the world's oceans acid as it is dissolved in seawater, and putting an enormous array of marine life at risk. Ocean acidification may wipe out much of the microscopic plankton at the base of the marine food web, and have a knock-on fatal effect up through shellfish to major human food species such as cod.

Waiting for an alternative energy system to come along at this point seems like misplaced optimism.

When I was growing up in the 60s, I remember my mom telling me how lucky we were to live in America, because other moms in Europe, pregnant around the same time she had been having kids, had been allowed to take Thalidomide for morning sickness; in America we'd had the FDA to protect us.

I wonder if patients who took Vioxx for pain relief would feel the same way today.

The June 2005 edition of Scientific American has an excellent article called "Doubt is their Product" by David Michaels, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in reading about the way corporate lobbyists exercise undue influence over the federal government and its institutions which were established to protect the consumer. This article isn't online yet, so if you don't subscribe to the print edition, you may want to look for a copy at your local library.

I don't know if anyone has posted this link already, but those on the Democrats.gov mailing list received a request from Harry Reid to sign his petition here, at: Filibuster Form

Today we went for a typical Sunday drive... stopped off at the sushi bar for a nice lunch. Drove through bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic to a computer shop to buy our son a new hard drive since his self-destructed a couple of days ago, and ended up detouring to a second computer store some distance away. We covered about 50 km. on this drive, and noticed nothing unusual. Nothing strange. Except the exhaust didn't smell so bad like it used to when we first bought the car! And it ran smoother, more quietly. Is that our imagination?

An unreleased EPA report, written in January 2004, shows that the EPA greatly understated the benefits of mercury reduction for the nation, particularly for the Southeast. In contrast to a public projection of $50 million for the whole country, the unpublished report shows a different story: "reducing national mercury emissions by 30 percent to 100 percent would produce Southeast benefits of between $600 million to more than $2 billion. ," according to SignonSanDiego.com.

What's more:

Last week there was a very interesting diary posted here called No wonder Bush fought the AWOL/Deserter charge which basically explained how Bush isn't really even qualified to be President, seeing is how he was a deserter from the military and all. Oops. Am I not supposed to use that word "deserter" when speaking of the CinC? Oh dear.

To me it goes without saying that he had already disqualified himself for the office by his violations of the Constitution in denying African Americans the right to vote... but I have still another reason why I think he should be disqualifed for service, and it's right here:

From the Guardian, Judge Dismisses Agent Orange Lawsuit :

The chemical companies, Monsanto Co., Dow Chemical Co. and others are relieved, because after all they were just following orders:

I found last week's diary A Technology to Save the Planet by TocqueDeville really exciting, and enjoyed reading all the comments about the Solar Tower, even - or maybe especially - the ones that offered criticisms of the idea. To my way of thinking, this project and its critics illustrate a favorite concept of mine - that it is possible to design technology that enhances society by being compatible with the environment as well as economically feasible; but to achieve this goal, concern for the environment must be incorporated into the original design of the technology. If society could somehow place the same emphasis on concern for the environment that we place on corporate profits, we could start designing living and working spaces that enhance the natural world rather than harming it.

More bad news about the 2006 proposed budget comes from the Wilderness Society via Common Dreams:

More below.

As part of its continuing assault on U.S. infrastructure, the Bush Administration plans in its 2006 budget to eliminate subsidies for Amtrak. This is according to the Yahoo story found here. As people familiar with Amtrak's operating costs will understand, this means they plan to shut down Amtrak.

More below the break.

So says Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in "Crimes of Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy." Among the numerous scandals outlined in this book is the gutting of the EPA, how it has lost its mandate to protect the environment for American citizens, and how it has instead been converted into an enabler for polluting corporations. Kennedy explains (below):