‘Hair Of The Dog’ No Hangover Cure, Say Experts

Winter spurs seasonal affective disorder

Take Steps to Avoid Winter’s Indoor Allergies

5 Dining-Out Strategies

Plus lots more.

At very least, this new year: Exercise

Best Fitness Routines Fit Your Personality, Studies Show

Mediterranean diet tied to slower mental decline

Healthy Habits challenge for January: Eat More Vegetables and Fruit

Plus lots more.

Tom Toles:

. . . and the rest of us starve.

Business Insider:

22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America

83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.

A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.

The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.

Marc Rubin, Tom in Paine (thanks to myi12xu):

Hillary Clinton supporters’ Christmas message: We told you so.

After the worst two years any Democratic president has ever had, with Democrats, liberals, and moderates fed up with him and knowing there is nothing but coal in their political and policy stockings, and after Obama did to the Democratic Party in 2 years what it took George W Bush to do to the Republicans in 8, Hillary Clinton supporters Christmas message to all those responsible for the mess of a presidency that is Obama is undoubtedly ” we told you so”.

And it’s not like it wasn’t obvious from the beginning. Obama had displayed his entire political life, but especially during the Democratic primaries, that he was the most underhanded, unscrupulous, dishonest, untrustworthy politician since Richard Nixon. But with none of Nixon’s grasp on real politics, how government works, foreign policy and certainly none of Nixon’s toughness.

So why all of Obama’s supporters are complaining now is hard to understand. There was nothing, absolutely nothing from day one, to recommend Obama on any level or suggest to anyone that Obama had any business being president, from his flagrant political dishonesty on display daily during the primaries and continuing into his presidency, his complete lack of conscience when it came to anything except his own political fortunes and his lack of ability evidenced in the fact that he had accomplished exactly nothing — zero — in 13 years as an elected official. Democrats can now add to Obama’s resume that he absolutely wasted the biggest congressional majority any president has had in 50 years…

So for those who supported Obama during the primaries because they turned a blind eye to who and what he was politically and are now wondering what went wrong, they can spend the holiday season reflecting and ruminating on the fact that there would have been real healthcare reform that included a public option instead of Obama’s selling out and pushing a health care bill that Howard Dean said should be junked. There would have been real financial reform, and there would have been tax cuts for the middle class without adding $700 billion to the deficit to give tax cuts to the upper 2% of income earners., And Democrats would still be handily in control of both houses of congress. There would have also been a much better use of the stimulus instead of Obama’s now famous admission that, $800 billion later, he miscalculated what “shovel ready projects” really meant. And of course there wouldn’t be the constant lying and reneging on a daily basis.

So Clinton’s supporters Christmas message this year for the DNC and others is undoubtedly “We told you so”. And while politically for the Democrats both in and out of congress it doesn’t look like its going to be much of a happy new year, they still have time to get their house back in order and start looking for a 2012 nominee who can actually win and do some good. Unless they want to hear “we told you so” all over again in 2012.

See how much things haven’t changed.

Washington Post:

Groups Criticize Inaugural Funding Plan

President-elect Bush’s plan to pay for most of his inauguration with private donations of up to $100,000 has drawn criticism from election finance watchdog groups, who warn that it would allow special interests to improperly curry favor with the new administration.

“It’s a terrible first message to send about what kind of administration he’ll be running,” said Don Simon, general counsel for Common Cause, a nonpartisan group that lobbies for accountability in government.

LA Weekly:

The Weekly’s Person of the Year
John Paul Stevens, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court

On the evening of Tuesday, December 12, in a decision of almost savagely incoherent reasoning, five U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled that a manual recount of Florida’s votes could not go forward, thereby awarding the presidency to George W. Bush. John Paul Stevens, the 80-year-old associate justice appointed to the court by Republican President Gerald Ford in 1975, authored a scathing dissent — an impassioned defense of the rule of democracy and the rule of law, both of which, astonishingly, had been called into question by the majority’s decision.

Editorial, The Capital Times (Madison, WI)

Media must count ballots

Elections are not organized for the benefit of candidates, nor even for the amusement of the media. They are organized in order to measure the sentiments of the citizenry. That essential democratic requirement was stymied by the Bush camp, the Republican Party and the U.S. Supreme Court in November and December. Now it rests with the Fourth Estate to complete the task.

Florida’s newspapers should embrace the task that lies ahead with verse and vigor. If ever there was a rationale for the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press, then this count is it. Republicans who object are, once again, standing on the wrong side of the Constitution and American democracy.

Editorial, Gleichheit, journal of the Socialist Equality Party of Germany:

The political crisis in the US: its implications for Europe and the world

The dispute surrounding the election result followed the same pattern as the impeachment attempt: an aggressive, shameless and ruthless Republican right—which does not shrink from employing any dirty trick or peddling any demagogic lie—and a timid, defensive, self-abasing response from the Democratic Party—which above all endeavours to conceal the extent of the conflict from the broad public…

America—where 40 million people do not have any health insurance, where workers have virtually no legal protection against being fired, where most households are highly indebted, and where old-age pensions, workers’ incomes and family savings depend upon the unstable stock market—is a social powder keg. A major fall in the stock market or a recession would mean disaster for millions. It could be the spark that sets off an explosion.

Phil Agre:

COUP WATCH: The New Jargon — From Red Rock Eater News Service

My long message about the hate mail that I’ve received since I started covering the election controversy brought quite a bit of testimony on the matter from people who are distressed at the name-calling, disregard for reality, and all-around dehumanizing scorn that they suffer from the members of this cult. Many of these folks reported feeling all alone with this abuse, and they spoke poignantly about being trapped in overwhelming conservative parts of the country where the cult and its jargon dominate public discussion to the exclusion of everything else.

Most of these people didn’t even think of themselves as liberals — at least not until they learned, for example, that Al Gore didn’t claim to have invented the Internet, wasn’t lying when he described his childhood farm chores, didn’t grow up in a luxury hotel, didn’t falsely claim to have been the model for Love Story, didn’t hold a fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple, didn’t propose abolishing the automobile, didn’t propose to outlaw guns, and so on. They had been genuinely shocked to discover that the cult members had been lying about these things, and they were even more shocked to discover that they and everyone around them had been living in a media bubble whose ranting and raving had shut off the oxygen from even these very simple truths. Some of them described the paralyzing despair that they experienced during the post-election controversy when they found themselves surrounded by angry and irrational people who display no respect for logic…

I am talking here about people who are emotionally abusive, and who have obviously invested effort in learning a whole technology of emotional abuse that they are deploying in a systematic way for (what they regard as) political purposes. I am talking about people who express themselves in snide, sarcastic, scornful tones, who express themselves in innuendoes, who invest incredible effort in provoking an intemperate response so that they can portray themselves as victims, and who engage in complicatedly indirect forms of rhetoric that deniably presuppose things that are false…

I do not want this jargon to succeed, and it can only succeed by taking over people’s minds. Everyone’s mind has its breaking point, and there is no shame in succumbing to the waves of vitriolic nonsense. And there is hope for those who have succumbed, if any humanity remains in them. But hope grows dim with time, and as the madness takes over more and more of our public discourse. When I read the newspaper today, I see dead people. I see vampires feeding on my country. I have no power to make them stop. What I can do, however, is to shine a light on them, and that’s what I’m trying to do here.

5 Tips for Keeping New Year’s Resolutions

For Cholesterol Control, Experts Urge More Than Meds

Follow This Plan to Lower Stroke Risk

Food Trends: Canning, men cooking, local

Plus lots more.

Susie:

How Merrill Lynch traders blew up their own firm

I’d really love for someone to explain to me why these guys haven’t been indicted:

Two years before the financial crisis hit, Merrill Lynch confronted a serious problem. No one, not even the bank’s own traders, wanted to buy the supposedly safe portions of the mortgage-backed securities Merrill was creating.

Political Wire:

Eight States Gain House Seats

“Republicans tightened their grip on the U.S. House with the release of new population figures that show GOP-leaning states in the South and Southwest will add congressional seats in the next election,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The big winner in 2012 and beyond is Texas, which will add four seats. Ohio and New York will each lose two seats. Elsewhere in the South, Florida will add two seats, and Georgia will add one.”

Undernews:

Time to enlarge the House of Representatives

Robert Cruickshank’s Diary – [The] release of the 2010 Census figures and the reapportionment of US House seats ought to reopen a discussion of the size of the House of Representatives itself. Instead of taking seats from one state and giving them to another, as mandated by a 1929 law capping the size of the House at 435, we should instead massively increase the size of the House – and decrease the number of people in each district – for the purposes of a more effective democracy…

We don’t have to return to districts of 30,000 people each. But 100,000 would seem reasonable. It’s a reasonable size, enabling members of Congress to get to know their constituents well – or have no excuse if they fail to do so. And it enables their constituents to more effectively interact with their representatives, while freeing up the Congressmember to spend more time on political reform and economic recovery.

In this case, a House drawn with districts of 100,000 would have about 3,080 members, based on the 2010 Census population of 308 million. That’s big. But the US is a big country. Surely our democracy can handle it.

Yes, but our rulers don’t want a more effective democracy.

Think Progress:

Lobbyist In Charge Of ‘Trying To Kill’ Financial Reform Hired By GOP Chair To Oversee Financial Regulations

A few days ago, incoming Agriculture Chairman Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) announced the hire of Ryan McKee as the senior staffer to oversee the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. McKee is currently a lobbyist working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s division dedicated to deregulating complex derivatives products. In her new role working for Lucas, McKee will be liaising with regulators in charge of implementing new rules under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law to overhaul the over-the-counter derivatives market.

As ThinkProgress reported, the Chamber, which is funded by AIG, JP Morgan, CitiGroup, and other financial interests, took the lead role in fighting to defeat Wall Street reform efforts. Last year, the Chamber organized a conference call with other financial industry lobby groups and bank lobbyists to coordinate their efforts.

I think Hugo Chavez is a pompous bully, but we have no right to overthrow him.

ZCommunications:

Wikileaks: Documents Confirm US Plans Against Venezuela

A substantial portion of the more than 1600 State Department documents Wikileaks has published during the past two weeks refer to the ongoing efforts of US diplomacy to isolate and counter the Venezuelan government.

Since Hugo Chavez won the presidency for the first time in 1998, Washington has engaged in numerous efforts to overthrow him, including a failed coup d’etat in April 2002, an oil industry strike that same year, worldwide media campaigns and varios electoral interventions. The State Department has also used its funding agencies, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to channel millions of dollars annually to anti-Chavez NGOs, political parties, journalists and media organizations in Venezuela, who have been working to undermine the Chavez administration and force him from power. When these interventionist policies have been denounced by the Chavez government and others, Washington has repeatedly denied any efforts to isolate or act against the Venezuelan head of state.

Nonetheless, the State Department cables published by Wikileaks clearly evidence that not only has Washington been actively funding anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela, but it also has engaged in serious efforts during the past few years to convince governments worldwide to assume an adversarial position against President Hugo Chavez.

The Independent, U.K.:

All drugs should be legalised to beat dealers, says former minister

All illicit substances, including heroin and cocaine, should be legalised, according to a former drugs minister who will today become the most senior politician to push for a dramatic change in the strategy for tackling Britain’s drug problems.

Bob Ainsworth will argue that it is better for addicts to receive their fixes on prescription rather than relying for their supply on the international criminal gangs that make billions of pounds from the trade.

This floored me (via Avedon),

Pat Robertson Wants to Decriminalize Pot

Timothy Karr, Free Press and SavetheInternet.com:

The Little Bill That Could

Little noticed but extremely important to progressives, on Saturday afternoon Congress also passed the Local Community Radio Act.

This legislation opens up radio spectrum to hundreds, if not thousands, of local independent radio stations (also known as LPFM)…

With the opening of the airwaves to LPFM stations, progressives can gain a small but consequential spot on the radio dial. The challenge now is to organize local groups to gain access to licenses. Follow and support the Prometheus Radio Project to learn more.

Undernews:

The Web 20 years later. . .

Guardian, Uk -On Christmas Day, 1990, in a lab at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee finished building the tools to create the world wide web. This act, 20 years ago, set the agenda for far-reaching transformations in the political sphere, in economies everywhere, in social interaction, even in concepts of our own identity. And Berners-Lee succeeded in doing so for one reason: he released the technology for free.

This simple decision, taken by a computer scientist used to working in environments that promoted openness and transparency, eclipses any hype about subsequent Twitter revolutions, Facebook campaigns or political protests ascribed to the platform since. The invention of the web is comparable to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450.

See how much things haven’t changed.

Ana Simo, TheGully.com:

The Deafening Silence of a Nation

Clinton’s impeachment was an immoderate, if not abusive, manipulation of the constitutional powers of Congress. But the installation of Bush in the White House by politicized judicial fiat and state government intervention is a far more dangerous blow to the very democratic institutions the nation is being called on to protect with obedient silence.

Silence is consent. And by consenting to an illegitimate Presidency, one that is not the product of a democratic election, Americans, bent on keeping peace today at any cost, may be sending instead a message of impunity to an increasingly corrupt political class: in other words, they can do as they please.

John Solomon, Associated Press

Ashcroft’s Conservative Leanings (link no longer works)

John Ashcroft once hailed Confederate war heroes as “patriots,” refused to sign a report on minorities in America and rented his fund-raising list to Linda Tripp at the very moment he was sitting in judgment of President Clinton at the impeachment trial.

Sacramento Bee:

Justices under siege: Attack on Florida court threatens judicial independence (link no longer works)

[I]t’s dangerous when activist ideologues or political parties target judges based on one decision; when they line up in partisan lockstep for and against specific judges; when they spend millions raised from special interests to influence judicial races. In all these cases, partisans imperil the independence of the judiciary. That threatens us all.

Dispensing justice from the bench must never become a popularity contest with voters. If a judge must always weigh his decisions against the chances he will have to defend them at the polls come election day, the rule of law is threatened and no citizen will be safe from the tyranny of the mob.

Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times:

These Messes Are What Deregulation Gets Us

Capitalism is falling apart. Tires explode, utility rates skyrocket, pharmaceuticals kill patients, telephone service is a mess, airports are gridlocked, broadcasters rip off scarce airwave spectrum for free and salmon in the Northwest are becoming transgendered and unable to breed. Even successful dot-commers are an endangered species.

Yes, Virginia, we do need government regulation. Not to build socialism but to save capitalism, because the market mechanism left to its own devices inevitably spirals out of control. Recognition of that reality has guided this country to prosperity ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt pulled us out of the Great Depression…

Throughout our history, when corporate greed has gotten out of hand, the public has demanded that government act. Let this be one of those times.

Bring Good Luck with New Year’s Food Traditions

Dieting Resolution Works Best When Done in Stages: Expert

7 Diet Tricks That Really Work

3 Reasons to Try Pomegranates

Plus lots more.

Got a Headache? Your Body May Be Telling You Something

Why exercise helps the heart

Season Coffee and Cocoa with This Fat-Fighting Spice

Fish oil won’t accelerate weight loss

Plus lots more.

See how much things haven’t changed.

Will Hutton, Guardian Unlimited, U.K.:

Right-wing coup that shames America

I never thought I would live to see it. There has been a right-wing coup in the United States. It is now clear beyond any doubt that the winner of the Presidential election was Al Gore. In Florida the votes are being counted unofficially in a way the Supreme Court would not permit: he was already 140 votes ahead when counting stopped for Christmas and his final lead promises to be in the thousands. Nationally he leads by over half a million votes. What has happened is beyond outrage. It is the cynical misuse of power by a conservative élite nakedly to serve its interests – and all of us should be frightened for the consequences…

[R]ight-wing America is not much interested in the democratic principle. It believes that its duty is to sustain America in its unique destiny as a Christian guardian of individual liberty, a place – I joke not – that will deserve Christ’s second coming. It sees itself in a holy war against a liberal enemy within, and its uses every tool at its disposal ruthlessly to dispose of its foe…

Whether the need to respect international treaties abroad or the desire to universalise medical protection at home, the US has the man in power it did not want and whose instincts are opposite to those of the majority. This will prove a disastrous administration for America and the world, and the coup will become widely understood as a moment of partisan infamy. It is a brutal lesson for us liberals. Never, never forget the treachery and poison on the Right.

Carla Binion, Bartcop:

Nation of children, nation of amnesiacs

From the moment George W. Bush was declared president-appointee, certain political leaders and media pundits have told the rest of the American people to: (1) Quickly forget voting irregularities in Florida, and (2) Revere our rulers and pundits, as if we were children and they embodied all parental wisdom. Here are the reasons why it is a bad idea that we become a nation of amnesiacs, and a nation of children.

Both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley imagined an eerie dystopian future, where democracy would be destroyed because citizens did not remember their own history. Huxley’s vision in Brave New World involved a nation so entranced with diversion-seeking that its people voluntarily gave up democracy in favor of hypnotically sucking the pacifier of non-stop entertainment…

We have been instructed by media pundits and certain politics leaders to forget what happened in Florida and to blindly suck the newest media pacifier—namely, the upcoming Bush inauguration extravaganza. What should we graciously suggest our paternalistic leaders to do with that pacifier instead?

John Nichols, Madison Capital Times

Beware of Bush’s Bipartisanship

President-select George W. Bush, fresh from his sweeping 5-4 victory over Democrat Al Gore on Supreme Court Election Day, is so determined to portray himself as a cross-party consensus builder that he has even learned to pronounce the word “bipartisan.”…

The Bush plan in the new Congress is a simple one: Talk up bipartisanship, get 20 to 30 Southern Democrats in the House and perhaps six or seven in the Senate to cast consistent votes for key elements of the Bush agenda — “fast-track” free trade negotiating authority, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, corporate-sponsored “reforms” of Social Security and Medicare, and new limits on abortion. Then Bush can claim with an Orwellian grin that he — a president elected without even a plurality of the vote — has united the country around his agenda.

Bringing together conservatives who call themselves Republicans with conservatives who call themselves Democrats is not coalition-building. It’s a con game, designed to fool the American people into believing that a man they did not elect as their president is acting in the national interest.

Editorial, Palm Beach Post

ASHCROFT WRONG CHOICE; VOTERS GAVE NO MANDATE (link no longer works)

The “uniter not a divider” has chosen one of America’s most divisive politicians to be the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.

George W. Bush paid his political debt to the religious conservatives who backed him by sending John Ashcroft’s name to the Senate for confirmation as attorney general. Mr. Ashcroft is a staunch anti-abortionist. Under Janet Reno, the Justice Department has strongly enforced laws that bar anti-abortion protesters from harassing clinic employees and their patients. Mr. Ashcroft almost certainly would be less vigilant in protecting the right to deliver and receive this legal medical procedure. For Floridians, particularly African-Americans frustrated by what happened here during the presidential election, the choice is galling. Minority voters hope the Justice Department under Mr. Bush will investigate allegations of voting irregularities in Florida. Mr. Ashcroft’s recent record will give them no encouragement.

Christian Mitchell, American Politics Journal:

Back the dog you got

The GOP has always been an organized solidarity. They fight like an army in battle, and they strike ferociously as a unified force. Focus on one target and attack viciously until it is reduced to a pile of ruins.

And now they have the field. They have the White House, the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court. They’re in their earthworks and fortified, the most coveted spot for an army, and for abatis they have Tom Delay and Dick Armey and the Christian Right with sticks pointed to razor sharpness, waiting to impale whoever charges them. All they have to do is stick together and huddle.

To fight an army like that, we have to become an army ourselves. And an army doesn’t fight a battle by splitting up its forces and fighting each other on the field, then letting the Division that survived fight the enemy. The division that’s left is bloodied and spent and has no energy left to fight the fight that counts.

We have to be a unified army and we have to stick together.

Well, sadly, THAT didn’t happen. Still hasn’t happened. Just won’t ever happen, I’m afraid.

Jane Twomey, Baltimore Sun

One-sided view taints coverage

THE NEWS MEDIA have missed one of the most important stories of the presidential election – one that could provide a history and civics lesson many Americans desperately need. It’s the story of alleged “voting irregularities” in Florida.

It’s not that the media haven’t covered the story. They have. In the weeks since the election there’s been no shortage of media appearances by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, interviews with black leaders (many of whom we seldom see or hear from otherwise) and inquiries about the allegations themselves.

It’s clear to anyone who can read a newspaper or watch television that many blacks are angry about the election results. But for all the apparent fact-finding involved in the coverage, the deeper race and civil rights issues at stake remain largely ignored.

Flu Activity Low So Far, But More Cases to Come: CDC

‘Un-Growth Hormone’ Increases Longevity, Researchers Find

XMRV not chronic fatigue syndrome cause

Demanding Relatives May Raise Heart Risks in Middle Age

Plus lots more.

From the South Loop of Chicago