While politicians play games, people live with the economic fallout of their cowardice. Because this was a predictable problem, and the health care reform bill should have included free prescription coverage for people in situations like this:

In 2009 and 2010, as the economic collapse shuddered across the globe, oncologists in California noticed a troubling trend: Three patients who had had serious tumors under control for as long as eight years reappeared in the clinic with massive cancer regrowth which, in one case, required emergency surgery. In retrospect, this downturn in fortunes should have been predictable: The economic recession had forced the patients to discontinue a life-extending medication.

"In all three cases, the patients developed new symptoms and came in after having missed an appointment or two without us knowing that they had stopped the drug," said Dr. Katie Kelley, co-author of a letter-to-the-editor in the Aug. 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, which describes the cases. Kelley is also assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

And there have been other such cases, both at UCSF and around the nation, either of patients stopping medications altogether or rationing in the hopes of making precious supplies last longer.

"Certainly we've seen an increase in affordability concerns," said Stephen Finan, senior policy director of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network in Washington, D.C. "Very definitely we've seen an upward trend in the last couple of years of people struggling with deductibles and cost sharing."

Got that? A lot of these people have insurance. They simply can't afford the deductibles. And that's what's going to happen when the new healthcare reform bill kicks in, too.

Medicare for all would have fixed this.

Wyclef Jean has filed papers to run for president of Haiti, and Sean Penn is skeptical.

Interviewed on CNN last night as Wyclef officially announced his bid, Penn said, "This is somebody who's going to receive an enormous amount of support from the United States, and I have to say I'm very suspicious of it, simply because he, as an ambassador at large, has been virtually silent. For those of us in Haiti, he has been a non-presence," Penn said.

Penn, who has been active in Haiti since the earthquake, highlighted allegations that Wyclef mishandled $400,000 donated for the country through his Yele Haiti foundation. "He claims he didn't do it. That has to be looked into it," said Penn, who has been running a 55,000-person tent camp through the J/P Haitian Relief Organization he co-founded. "I've been there. I know what $400,000 could do for these people's lives."

He added, "I'm not accusing Wyclef Jean of being an opportunist; I don't know the man," Penn told Wolf Blitzer, who was filling in for Larry King. "One of the reasons I don't know very much about Wyclef Jean is that I haven't seen or heard anything of him in these last six months that I've been in Haiti."

President Obama killed and Jay Leno bombed at the WHPC. That's got to be embarrassing to all comedians, especially conservative comics.

Wanna know why?

The only person whose ratings fell more than mine did last year is here. Great to see you, Jay!” Obama dinged the off-and-on Tonight show host, who, when his turn came on the podium at the Washington Hilton, proceeded to confirm just why that might be true.

Obama—aided (as presidential political guru David Axelrod acknowledged to me when the show was over) by the razor-sharp jokesters from The Daily Show—came armed with fresh and funny material that prompted some of the biggest laughs I’ve witnessed the Leader of the Free World receiving in more than two decades of attending this strange Washington media-political celebration of self-congratulation—a tribal (and, to outside observers, potentially unappealing) rite of spring in which supposedly discerning and skeptical journalists laugh their posteriors off and lavishly kiss the one belonging to the Comedian-in-Chief.

Leno, while entirely competent, recycled and repurposed old material from his television show—and even made a mother-in-law joke. After one of his japes was greeted by eerie silence, it was hard not to feel a tinge of sympathy for him when he marveled desperately, “This is a tough room!”

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This is a block buster. Former Sen.(D)Bob Graham, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee told David Shuster that he never was briefed about waterboarding by the CIA on MSNBC. He also said that he was never allowed to take real notes about the CIA briefings, but he did log the topics and the amount of times he was briefed. They don't match up with the CIA's version. And of course, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet's outfit never was wrong or misled us before. James Fallows backs up Graham's honesty and integrity by the way. And Graham also sees the real motives behind the smearing of Pelosi. As he says it's an attempt to shift the blame away the Bush administration and their use of torture.

Graham: David, when I was briefed about three weeks after The Speaker, the subject "waterboarding" never came up. Nor did the treatment of Abu-Zubaydah or any other specific detainee.

Shuster: And that's significant because by the time of your briefing and the Speaker's briefing we now know that Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, so again was their a requirement, was it incumbent on the CIA to tell you as the Chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee or a ranking member, was there an obligation on them to tell you what was going on?

Graham: Yes, they're obligated to tell the full Intelligence Committee not just the leadership. This was the same time, within the same week in fact that the CIA was submitting their National Intelligence Estimate or NIE report on WMD's in IRAQ which proved so erroneous that we went to war and that have had thousands of persons killed and injured as a result of misinformation.

David, I think fundamentally what's happening is there's an attempt underway to try and shift the discussion away from what's really important and that is did the US use torture? Was that within the law? Who authorized and what were the consequences of that. Those are the important issues. Whether The Speaker or anybody else knew about it is frankly sort of off on the edges.

Graham blasts the CIA for also misleading us in the IRAQ WAR, but they would never try to mislead Pelosi or smear her now. He also calls for a Truth Commission on Torture. Can Republicans now keep denying that we need a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of all this torture business?

Greg Sargent broke this story:

Former Senator Bob Graham, who received a classified briefing on terror detainees during the same month in the fall of 2002 as Nancy Pelosi, was not briefed about the use of either waterboarding or enhanced interrogation techniques during the meeting, he claimed in an interview with me.

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I wrote about the original survey back in December, and this is great news for the families of children who attend these schools. (One of these schools is only a few blocks from my house. You can check your local school at the link.)

While I'm not too pleased with the direction of Obama's economic and military policies, I do give the administration big props for the actions taken so far by the top federal agencies:

WASHINGTON — In its most sweeping effort to determine whether toxic chemicals permeate the air schoolchildren breathe, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce plans today to monitor the air outside 62 schools in 22 states. Texas and Ohio have the most schools on the list, with seven each; Pennsylvania has six.

The plan will cost about $2.25 million and includes taking samples outside schools in small towns such as Story City, Iowa, and Toledo, Ore., and in large cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. It comes in response to a USA TODAY investigation that used the government's own data to identify schools that appear to be in toxic hot spots.

"Your stories raised important questions that merit investigation and that's what we're doing," EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said Monday. "We want parents to know that the places their children live, play and learn are safe."

USA TODAY's investigation, published in December, used a government computer simulation that showed at least 435 schools where the air outside appeared to be more toxic than the air outside Meredith Hitchens Elementary, an Ohio school closed in 2005. At Hitchens, the Ohio EPA found levels of carcinogens 50 times above what the state considered acceptable.

USATODAY

As many as one in five members of the armed services are being preyed on by loan centers set up near military bases that can charge cash-strapped military families interest of 400% or more, a new Pentagon report has found. Steep lending charges have long plagued servicemembers, but the problem has become a more urgent concern to the military as it has struggled to fill its ranks during the Iraq war. That's because debt troubles can keep troops from going overseas...read on

A Conservative Congressman is leading the charge to screw the troops...Think Progress has more...

But one conservative congressman, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY), is trying to gut the amendment. Davis has proposed his own language — praised by the payday lending industry — that sets no real limits on predatory lenders. One of Davis’s aides admitted last week that he consulted on the legislation with “CNG Financial of Mason, Ohio, one of his top campaign donors and owner of national payday lender Check ‘n Go.”

Today may be the last day to stop Davis in his tracks. Call his office now and tell him to stop enabling predatory lenders who are hurting the U.S. military.

Rumsfeld and the Powell Doctrine!

USATODAY

By John Diamond, Steve Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY

excerpt:

Rumsfeld's plan

The strategy outlined by Rumsfeld and other top officials this week has three components:

• Use overwhelming ground force backed by artillery and air power to take control of the insurgent haven.

• Move in immediately with reconstruction efforts to repair battle damage.

• Leave a force in Fallujah large enough to prevent a collapse back into violence.

The goals are simple: to win the gratitude of Fallujah civilians who will no longer have to cope with Iraqi and foreign fighters in their midst; and to demonstrate to other insurgent-dominated towns and cities what can happen if they refuse to participate peacefully in the Iraqi political process.

Why didn't Rummy use this plan at the begining of the Iraq war? It sounds a lot like the Powell Doctrine!

Matt Lauer was joined by Karen Hughes, on the TODAY show to talk about Iraq and the upcoming election.
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Lauer asked her about the USATODAY story that says: "A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the U.S. government as the source." Is it acceptable behaviour that the US pays journalists to plant stories in the foreign media?

Hughes: ...you see it around the world. There is a lot of misinformation, there's a lot of rumors, a lot of out right lies out there. We still confront myths about September 11th, that crop up all over the world...

What is she talking about? All the myths seem to be spread around by the administration. The myth that Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda? You get the idea. By the way, how did Karen do over in the middle east? Link "By the end of the trip, Hughes had so annoyed a group of Saudi women, they barked at her."

By Harvey F. Wachsman

If there is a medical malpractice crisis today, it has nothing to do with lawsuits. Studies show that from 100,000 to 195,000 people die each year because of malpractice in American hospitals. That doesn't begin to count the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed by serious injuries caused by negligence. The true crisis is an epidemic of medical malpractice.

Those who attack lawyers and demand radical changes to the legal system are blaming the messengers and trying to punish the victims. Lawsuits are the only protection the public has against negligent physicians.

Imagine being an expectant mother in a hospital. Your obstetrician decides it's unnecessary to come to the hospital right away. The fetal monitor shows signs that the baby is not getting enough oxygen. When the physician finally delivers the baby hours later, the child is severely brain damaged.

The medical establishment and insurance companies would like that mother to be forced into some sort of "alternative dispute resolution," which would prevent her from suing. They would like to have secret arbitrations, with no juries and no public scrutiny. They would like to cap the amount that a jury could award to her and her baby. But that child will need a lifetime of attention - special schools, a handicapped-accessible home, extensive medical care and someone to take care of him if he outlives his parents.

Tort-reform advocates also would prefer a system in which offenders aren't blamed and there is no accountability. But the health care system needs more accountability, not less. Most physicians are dedicated, diligent people, but those who are not should have a spotlight shined on them. More...