UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE AND CONSTITUTIONALITY. What's worrisome these days is that Scalia can compare offering universal health care coverage to all as forcing people to buy broccoli, as if health and welfare were not constitutional concerns, and could be blamed on the eating habits of people. The costitution is our guarantee to welfare, and what should be questioned is why universal health care has not been a reality, much like education. What's even more worrisome is that there are unrealistically low income levels determinining whether someone qualifies for Medicaid, which, when the costs of health care are taken into consideration, is also discriminatory, by turning a blind eye to economic realities in the twentyfirst century. Scalia's comments, along with Ginsberg's, about "us" having to pay for those who aren't covered by health insurance are calloused reminders of how, even within the court, there is an erosion of constitutional right guarantees extended to a vulnerable class of people, those economically disadvantaged. Not protecting them is not a matter of opinion, it's a constitutional violation. The individual mandate is anticonstitutional because it expects people who can't afford to pay for health insurance to do so; for the law to be constitutional all it would take is to insure that those who cannot afford the payments are assisted by the government, including small businesses which could not afford to cover their staff. People who refuse coverage out of conviction and not financial necessity should be fined, much like those who don't pay their income taxes are fined.And discriminating against preexisting conditions can be equiparated to a death sentence, which, much like the rest of this, is outrageous enough.

WHAT'S SAD is the life wasted of a young man who wore sunglasses while being followed by a "crazy white man" with his own set of references.

THE NEW HEALTH CARE LAW. A rallying point either for Republicans or Democrats vyeing for congressional placement, people be damned, it only required the employing of a good statistician and accountant to calculate the cost of healthcare that would plummet someone into bankruptcy in the event of an emergency or multiple emergencies, compare it to household income and expand Medicare and Medicaid to cover those who would be ruined by medical costs, and institute a sliding scale or no payment at all. Hell, for that matter why not regulate medical expenses since it's not written in stone that they should be so high. To hear Justice Ginsburg and the individual mandate requiring all to acquire health insurance or pay a penalty, since "The problem is that they are making the rest of us pay", American citizens are just slacking off from the natural wealth they were born into, or should no longer be considered US citizens if they earn little because in this frame of mind American citizens don't have the constitutional right to health care regardless of economic status, because it was assumed by Romney that all could pay for Health benefits and those who can't still can spare the money to pay an unconstitutional penalty since, again, we're all swimming in it. Who the hell needs to open health insurance to the free market? How is the free market a guarantee to constitutional equality? Or for that matter, why look a gift horse in the mouth, says Elena Kagan, since money will be pouring in state's coffers with this bill? What makes even more sense is if the individual mandate fails to pass, then private health insurance companies, busy privatizing the administrative expenses and income of and from gallbladder functions,are not required to accept all applicants and can bar them because of pre-existing conditions, in an amazing reasonable feat of wayward logic.

Clamored as a democratic Arab Spring revolution, reality's chips are falling in a different pattern instead. The sale of women's skarves exploding in Tunisia, Ennahda there made Islam a state religion, with the Western World sighing a sigh of relief because Islamic law was not made the basis for the constitution.What progress! When Judaism was posited as the state religion for Israel it was accurately seen as an anti-democratic extreme rightist measure. So what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. The Muslim Brotherhood in an Egypt that just recently considered an Al Quaeda member not guilty in a court of law claims it will not arm Hamas, even if Hamas came from its ranks because Hillary Rodham Clinton has just given the go ahead to export arms to the country and does not want to look bad.

CATHERINE ASHTON, European Union's foreign policy chief drew parallels between the deaths of the three Jewish children in Toulouse and children in Gaza. So did Mohammed Merah, the cold blooded murderer of the three, but he did a little more: he filmed the killings.

WHY WORRY ABOUT VICTIMS OF A CRIME WHEN YOU CAN CASTRATE THEM? Henk Heithuis, who had been raised in Dutch Catholic institutions was sexually abused by a priest. He told the police, was brought to a Catholic psychiatric hospital and castrated in 1956. It seems other 10 were mutilated as well. Heithius died in an accident two years later. The sexual abuser was transferred to Nova Scotia to work with children still.

ARIZONA'S MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES have been banned for political bias and teaching "anti-white" positions by encouraging ethnic solidarity that violates the student's individuality. Let alone that being Mexican American is a reality that has nothing to do with being anti anybody else, in this case "white" must define one very large person the Democrats are picking on.

21 CENTURY RELIGION. Bolstered by the current upswing of religion in politics and all things secular, from the Arab Spring countries to the States, where it took a Democratic president to exempt religious employers from the equality in contraceptive coverage with the same religious employers now briefing the Supreme Court to exempt all Americans from comprehensive health coverage, since the court has ruled to favor the spiritual administration of absolution regardless of the existence of law enforcement agencies, Pope Benedict XVI has decided to throw his weight around the world, much as Angela Merkel throws hers around Europe. Now in Mexico, just to illustrate how efficient the metaphysical legislature will be, the Pope supports the conservative PAN party in the upcoming election by fondly recalling how he sentenced a Father Maciel, a rapist of seminarians, to a life of prayer and penance, in choosing not to visit with victims of sexual abuse in the country. Next stop Cuba, to convince President Raul Castro that socialized medicine is an affront to procreation, status differences between people and to the individual right to higher premiums.

SUPREME ISOLATION. While Justice Thomas explores historical documentation from centuries ago to support his originalist constitutional decisions, neither he nor Breyer seem inclined to do the same when dealing with contemporary issues. For Breyer, the court steers clear of news and politics which for Thomas are just "noise", even though the latter has Tea Party connections. Amicus briefs supporting one side or the other are taken into consideration. They can cost anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 dollars in legal fees, with an additional cost of a couple of thousand to print. So, unless you pay and earn much more than 25,000 a year, or an organization can provide you with lawyers to try to protect constitutional rights now trapped into considerations of how a generic drug can kill you by not describing its counter indications, since the latter would give it the same constitutional rights and standing in society of a brand name pharmaceutical, the Supreme Court can impose its intergalactically nebulous decisions without ever taking our welfare into consideration by taking a stroll among the people of this country, even just to sightsee.

GOVERNMENTAL UNACCOUNTABILITY. Federal District Court Judge John A. Woodcock Jr. decided that Maine's Republican Governor Paul R. LePage was protected by "governmental speech" when he allowed for the removal of a mural of the history of the labor movement from a state building. This category then would allow for the expression of something with current and future ambitions through the means of discriminatory drivel and senseless sophistry to bar unions as a whole and a class of people from the electoral and governing processes involved in determining laws and in choosing members of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches, just to keep things as far away from inclusiveness as possible.

THE PIPELINE THAT WOULDN'T DIE. Keystone XL oil construction, regardless of its cropping up continuously in bills and battled against by environmentalists, has been resuscitated a third time after promises of its being put to rest by the president. Yesterday President Obama assured everyone that it would be built from Cushing to the gulf. This decision, after environmental activists part of the democratic base that elected President Obama had been arrested outside the White House protesting it, and after a sudden change of heart by a good portion of the American public on not using the price of oil as a tenet to evaluate a president in an election, also coincided with a recent speech by Santorum, that blasted global warning as a myth, much to the delight and hooted agreement of his audience. For that matter, all three Republican candidates are for drilling, and more drilling, and then some, even though the environmental hazards are considerable and getting worse and although they express concern for the cost of gasoline, much like the rest of the country triumph a free market, which leads to oil being sold outside of the country and at prices decided by the market,or the same old same old, with any alternative, including trade laws simply too involving of the government to even consider in a country where a vociferous mass roars about socialism as a step away from God and a hop towards the devil, and even resents the term sociology, France and the Scandinavian countries be damned. For that matter, add Labour to the incandescent mix, and you would get benefits outweighing the 1% to the considerable advantage of the country. The pipeline is said to traverse an area billions and billions of galaxies away from aquifers, but leakage is inevitable, all the while a clear vision of converting to clean energy and electric cars in the years with tax incentives, as the president himself was planning, seems to have lost its impetus. And Obama holds on,a steady light at least on Medicare, which he has cut, but the Republicans, through Ryan's budget, want to destroy with an inane voucher system.

IMPAIRED REASONING. A company in California called Global something is sending out emails offering one hour cable show specials to people with opinions. It's as good as being thought of as stupid or well meaning.

KARZAI'S RECORD ON HUMAN RIGHTS. Some days ago The New York Times reported that Afghanistan's president Karzai considered human rights another import from Western culture.

ELITE MEDICATION.Due to a Supreme Court decision ruling that generics could not be required to print side effects of the drug on sale since that would bring them closer to company pharmaceutical status, people who were injected with an anti-nausea drug that, when in contact with arterial blood flow, could cause gangrene and did, lost the lawsuit. No one questioned why a drug like that was put on the market in the first place.

A disgruntled Mitt Romney lamented at his Illinois win that we have become a nation of lawsuits.

INDEPENDENT congressman extraordinaire Bernie Sanders did his research: .56 cents to the gallon is the amount due to global speculation on oil prices.

There is nothing more obscene than the senseless, calculated, monstrous inhumanity behind the murders of an adolescent for "looking black" and four people, along with French parachutists, for being minorities.

A half baked would be law in Arizona thinks it a good idea to have women discuss their need for contraceptives with their bosses.

WHAT SEEING FLUKE AS A SLUT REALLY MEANS. Calling a woman a slut and a prostitute only because she sustains healthcare for women is erasing the constitutional violation against the equality of women in this country that religious organizations are responsible for. Refusing to pay for health care, leaving it a province of health insurances is a violation of the separation of church and state, since religious organizations employ citizens, whether or not they're co-religionists. If anything, the choice of taking or not contraceptives should be the individual's moral or personal choice,made under the advice of a competent doctor, not a dictat mandated from a religious institution from above, which now carries the same import as a law, and that law is one against reproductive rights. Calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute is slander and, due to Limbaugh's position as radio host, harmful to Fluke professionally as well by polarizing future employers, also a recent development in Supreme Court decisions on hirings by religious institutions, for one, and possibly a future trend for discrimination in others, so it's not only an effort to inhibit a person from functioning in defense of herself, but also classist discrimination meant to impoverish women. If the advertizers pulled out, they did so also for self-interest: they could have been sued for constitutional violations, as the AFL-CIO and Southern Poverty Law Center have done in countless cases before, which would have proven a more effective technique than Steinem and Fonda supporting the classist FCC by wanting it to uphold its rulings on offensive language, since that language is also used as a kind of shorthand to criticize behavior that is also inhumane and unconstitutional. For that matter, Maher's advice on going easy on Limbaugh just is a go ahead for harmful unconstitutional behavior as well.

AFGHANISTAN, AFGHANISTAN. Well, first there was the Homeland Security report detailing the increase of Extremist Right wing terrorist groups in 2009 that was combated against by Conservative politicians as being an exaggeration,to which Napolitano agreed. The report seems to have also caused some concerns with the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Then there was a General advocating genocidal techniques while the rest were more concerned with warfare. Then there was the urinating on dead bodies. Then Maddow and the Times declare that the burning of the korans was accidental, because that's what the surveying team found. Then suveying teams are no longer an accurate fount of information for Times writer Kate Wenner, who wrote a play about brain damage and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in soldiers and insists that even though the Germanophile Bales, responsible for the murder of 16,had been diagnosed only with minor brain injury, it's not out of the question that he could have been seized by a mental replay of the last time he shot a toddler ( does PTSD lead to genocide? Or does thinking you're in Afghanistan to plug all Arabs?)and gone on a rampage, unaware of time and place, this unrelated to the discounting of hundreds of soldiers who were not diagnosed correctly as PTSD sufferers to save money from the coffers so that Karzai can embezzle another billion from the Kabul bank, then demolish the watch dog agencies put together to prevent corruption and further encourage sound investors in Afghanistan by claiming it was only an issue of patronage, while tending the embers of an Anti-American sentiment that, in the koran burning incident, killed more Afghans than US citizens.

THE FCC BAN. If one starts from a standpoint of freedom, justice and all-inclusiveness it seems untenable to support the FCC bans since, not living in a perfect world, one might support a biologically determined ruling class and another might claim that racial (white, black) riots are justifiable only to support brain-deadening power structures that have nothing in common with governing. I mean, I still need to say that Grover Northquist is a dumb twat in waiting for a dead genocidal master who thought he could submit millions ptolemaically. And it also follows that I have nothing in common with a power-fucker bumbo who limbos also for the cheap thrill of rubbing her pair of Chanel pumps in my face. Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut was sexist and classist; calling someone a slut isn't necessarily so. And the ban is classist.

HOMELESS: A person whose right to panhandle to self-medicate is frowned upon, and he or she better take it too. Occasioanlly killed by uniformed individuals feeling frisky.

THE THEORY OF CRONY ENTERTAINMENT. A finite group of artists envied for having both income and talent. Or for wearing shoes.

GAS MATTERS. Even though the price of gas is rising and getting on everybody's nerves with some polls showing lowered approval ratings for the president because of the situation, most people are keeping an even keel by not considering it a factor for a presidential election, regardless of Newt Gingrich's two dollar and odd magical promises. Some do believe it a matter the government should be able to control, not realizing that prices are set globally, with the current instability in Arab countries not helping any. Even drilling in the US would reflect global prices set in the global market and the quantity of oil produced wouldn't put a dent into the need bucket.

HOPES DASHED AT PROVING EINSTEIN WRONG: Retest sees neutrinos as lazier than light.

THE TALIBAN have broken peace talks again and their consequent renounciation of terrorism, as President Karzai wants American forces to stay on their bases as early as 2013 and not engage in contact with Afghans, a measure not without dangers that would have aided post 2014 counter-insurgency against fundamentalist terrorists, thus paving a way to a cuddly political acceptance of the Taliban by expanding finite groups of people. Panetta, in the heat of this moment, while visiting with Karzai, was offered yet another example of a coalition force member switching sides and supposedly ideas by trying to drive into a group of Marines with a stolen pick-up truck, setting himself on fire instead. Since 2006 70 Americans have been killed in such attacks in Afghanistan, which have also taken place in Pakistan, this after years of American solidarity on all levels with the plight of Afghanis against those awful Soviets who saw them as satellites to their greater power, a role we have come to claim on their shores, then.In the meantime the Taliban are running a popularity contest with Afghans, who seem to be very understanding of bloody foibles should they occur for customs whose brutality can be justified as idiosyncratic while the vast interaction with our amorphous mass of America seems also to have created hybrids such as Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who tried to kill an American soldier, instead of delegating a male relative to do so. While thriving on an opium trade in the past, the Taliban are now making a living mostly through abductions, some lasting years and ending in murder. Other groups involved sell their victims to them or Al Quaeda, and they in turn request money and the exchange of hundreds of prisoners, this while peace talks were an option (as they still are).The people kidnapped include tourists, journalists and aid workers, or basically, anyone who isn't them crying out " Allah made me do it". The Koran has also been a favorite excuse for the indiscriminate murder of U.N. workers and U.S. personnel, since appearance is the visible and uncontestable proof of whether someone considers it a text for burning. In these cases, it is supported unquestionably by believers in countries they wish its teachings would illuminate the nation's drive to turn it into the only code for the only religion available for moral consolation and pride in oneself, since neither could be found in just action.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. A new bill on domestic violence, which expands its reach, faces opposition from Conservatives and the Republicans in the Judiciary Committee, based on prejudicial argumentation at best. Domestic Violence is already undergoing stresses in evaluation: now the New York Housing Authority will not give preferred placement to victims of psychological battery, only physical, and only if accompanied by police complaints. The new law would expand coverage to immigrants by offering them temporary visas, Indian tribes, rural areas and same sex couples. The verbose and inconsequential opposition has been telling: it resents helping illegal immigrants, basically depriving them of protection in the eventuality of the crime and considers the expansion to other groups a dilution of the law's coverage. Phyllis Schlafly is the most calloused, discriminatory, short sighted and inhumane arguers of them all: she considers complaints of domestic violence only an example of man hatred aimed at destroying the sacred bond of marriage by leading to divorce. After all, what is facing murder or the possibility of a breakdown leading to harm to oneself or others in the face of the sanctity of marriage and a necessarily unspoken male's prerogative to violent prevarication, that should not even be met with a self-preserving hatred for the offending party, not of his entire gender?

PANJWAI, AFGHANISTAN. Abdul Samad, a relative of 11 of the victims murdered by a genocidal killer in the U.S. military in Afghanistan was on the phone with President Karzai, telling him that Americans were responsible for killing his family, that they had been told to return to Panjwai only to be killed by Americans, and to either get rid of Afghanis or to kick Americans out of the country.

FOR WHOM THE BELL POLLS. The president's approval rating takes a dip-from 50% last month to 41% now, a New York Times CBS poll finds. A good 54% believe that the president, as president of this vast, godly and powerful country of ours, has the secret powers to lower gas prices but chooses not to use them just to lose voters in November on purpose. In the matter of foreign policy 47% believe we should sustain Israel in an attack against Iran's nuclear capabilities, while 42% are new found pacifists.

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN is going fine, just fine, thank you. Karzai is surreptitiously roaring about American forces being behind the Koran burnings and the civilian slaughter of sixteen since it's past our policy to call a book burning exactly what it is and make it grounds for a dishonorable discharge because in a bipartisan world the extreme right has a place in war, in politics and at the table of the gods, all with the bigoted vote to account for. It can be argued that people die in conflicts anyway, our long suffering heroes and torn civilians, regardless of the avalanche of prejudiced Anti-American feeling fed by a Taliban that starves its widowed women, destining them to poverty without any assistance because deprived of male support and our efforts at democracy, pressured by willful electoral misperceptions, undermine the work the Green Berets are doing with the civilian population by planning an early withdrawal, justifying it by attempting to stage the enemy as a talk partner, one that wouldn't be seen dead at peace chats because, hey, the field will be left clear of colonization soon enough. We're leaving a nation we promised to help into democracy a nation ruined by corruption, impoverished and suffering at the hands of exactly those we not only still try to organize civilians against but those we set out to defeat for justice, equality and wellbeing.

WHERE'S THE FRUIT, MA? The latest groundswell against undocumented immigrants that generated prohibitive legislature such as in Alabama and Arizona is still taking place. Rejoicing in millions of dollars in lost business by arming adolescents to blast away at the first sighting of possible domestic workers looking for a viable living Jan Brewer, the Arizona Republican governor, is still involved in an invisible shouting match with President Obama, who is still not doing enough to remedy the situation for her, forgetting the addition of 21,000 Border Patrol, highest it's ever been, and the use of video surveillance and even drones, mistaking the Mexican border for Gaza or Iran. In the meantime the paraphrenalia to stop strawberry pickers is multiplying: radar, thermal imaging cameras and drone boats are being offered for sale, as The New York Times reports. This new group of fame hungry and blood thirsty paparazzi is also busy trying to train the house cat to pounce on Mexican food delivery service for good measure and looks askance whenever the name Marco Rubio is mentioned, now that his escape from Castro is no longer a thing of the past.

THE GERMAN CHANCELLORSHIP AND THE E.U.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the leader of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde are on talking terms, even if their understanding of policy is different. Merkel is a full believer in austerity measures that drain countries in need of important social assistance funds for one, because her German electorate overall doesn't take to helping in the bailout of nations kindly, while Lagarde believes that growth should be sustained for harder put European nations and that the pool of aid should be increased to discourage speculators. The two have already exchanged some gifts: Merkel has given Lagarde a recording of Beethoven by the Berlin Philharmonic, since she is a lover of classical music, while Lagarde has given Merkel a Hermes trinket. Merkel has other ideas for gifts if the friendship progresses: year-old apple strudel, a packet of Get Well cards bought at a discount for Lagarde to send to countries in trouble, a subscription to circular coupon delivery services and a membership at Costcos.

WHATEVER IT TAKES. Santorum, who made a recent appearance at AIPAC recently, is trying to influence Gingrich to quit the race so that Republicans can nominate a conservative candidate for 2012. Various techniques have been used, mostly sending emails reading "Pleeeeease let me run alone!" or "So what if you won Georgia, God wants me to win the South!" or "I saw Callista's hair wave in the wind: I know the hairspray industry is pulling out of your campaign."Gingrich has responded by dancing the night away with his wife to the tune of "Rocket Man" by Elton John, and is planning four daily appearances in the South to secure the tele evangelist vote.

RUSH LIMBAUGH is a filthy cunt.

ANTI-GAY BULLYING AND MINNESOTA SCHOOL DISTRICTS. Thanks to the courage of six students who sued a Minnesota school district for anti-gay bullying through Southern Poverty Law Center and The National Center for Lesbian Rights, the district will be monitored for five years by the Departments of Justice and Education.

TEA PARTY AND CIVIL RIGHTS: NO LONGER AN OXYMORON. The various Tea Parties are organizing as non-profits and the I.R.S. is questioning the status. According to the law, the main concern of non-profits should be social welfare and not political support of a candidate. The agency is also requesting information from Karl Rove's American Crossroads and President Obama's Priorities U.S.A.. Seeing the double opening here, Jay Sekulow, a conservative lawyer, lunged in defense of the Tea Partiers by mixing his metaphors. The closest he could come to a recent persecution was accusing the I.R.S. of Mc Carthyism,which he would have been responsible for if these were the 50's. On a roll, he crossed convenient racial boundaries by comparing Tea Partiers to the N.A.A.C.P. as a plea to wider support, then decided to appeal to his higher powers, Republican politicians.

THE SUPREME COURT expanded the scope of a human rights violation case to the American juridical system, to be determined beginning October. The first involves deciding whether conrporations can be sued as responsible parties for torture on foreign soil, which seems to question the obvious since if a U.S. corporation is responsible for torture, it should be sued, as torture is a big no-no here, where its headquarters are and internationally everywhere. By the same line of reasoning, Alito falls out of the no-no zone by opening the case to an evaluation of if American courts are responsible for judgments on torture, his claim being that they aren't an opening to the acceptance of torture as a practice uncorrectable by the American Court system. American courts have been trying these cases since the 1980s.

IN RUSSIA, among valid objections, a member of Solidarnosc was arrested for objecting to Putin's win. The organization was famous for having demolished Polish unions as they were in the 1980's through the leadership of Lech Walesa, thereafter more interested in womanizing. It claimed through much red-baiting that the unions were not Polish enough, which explains why members are being arrested in Russia.

Mr. Romney's comment for the benefit of the working class that he listed Nascar team owners among his acquaintances really doesn't do much for those who prefer to find something interesting to read.

WHY don't newspapers report accidents in work setting resulting in deaths instead of only crime related stories?

GIANCARLO FINI, speaker of the house during Berlusconi's government in Italy is in the U.S. meeting President Obama and Netanyahu. The man had a political past involving affiliation in a party of recycled fascists and is also a personal friend of Nancy Pelosi's.

IN BRAZIL the 2016 Olympics are a big thing. People have been chosen by others to abandon their neighborhoods so that stadiums can be built there instead by workers at existing low wages to celebrate the grandness of the games and the country's glory. Unfortunately for some, the residents of the locations in question have no intention of leaving and workers are requesting higher pay, threatening a strike.

IN AN EFFORT not to challenge what's known into transparency, Putin won the lections again. Even with a handful of reputable candidates the ballots were mostly decorated with pushes toward nationalism, including the Just Russia party which in 2004 ran against the weeping with joy reelected candidate by recommending him and a post-political example of a business magnate with no party affiliation but the New Jersey Nets which he owns to vote for him.

EXAMPLE OF THE CONTINUING PAST TENSE IN A HOTEL ROOM. Your housekeeper has been Shelly. FROM: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Picador Press.

WOMAN AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ACTIVIST Sandra Fluke was called a slut and a prostitute by Rush Limbaugh after she testified that student health plans at Georgetown University did not cover birth control and the out of pocket costs ran to about $1,000 yearly. The radio commentator actually suggested what he thought a fair exchange: for covered costs visual coverage of the act for all to see, bringing us all a little too close to the man's particular but catholic tastes.

As reported in The New York Times, state colleges and universities are waning in their ability to provide their student body with programs in science, health care and engineering due to state budgetary cuts,put in place in times of recession, but never eliminated or reduced in times of growth. Although popular and in demand, the programs are expensive to run,same as art programs, so now the trend is going strong to have private, elite institutions and those who can have the advantage over Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Florida and Texas state institutions which have had to close down their engineering and computer science programs.

OBJECT OF CONCUSSION. The Blunt amendment defeated 51 to 48 yesterday, no longer enables bosses to have a prayer to thank for being able to refuse health coverage for whatever condition they see fit.

GAY IN RUSSIA. In St. Petersburg ads addressing minors concerning gay rights are seen by the Orthodox Church as being a perverse effort by Western democracies to destroy Russia's moral fiber. Even now their agents in the U.S. Conservative Party and the National Organization for Marriage are hot at work to samovar the Tea Party.

MINE FAMILY POLITICS: Hughie Elbert Stover, an Upper Big Branch mine security chief gets 3 years in prison and a $20,000 fine for his involvement in the death of 29 miners. Alan Carlson, guilty of child abuse for having his grandchildren trek in high temperatures believing they would lose weight risks a life sentence.