In the United States, every celebration is turned into a reason to buy.
Happy Halloween.
Recently Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust. It doesn’t get any more immoral than that. Our financial industry (actually, their financial industry) has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. 
Brand-new research finds that people who drink coffee are at reduced risk of developing basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer. And the more they drink, the lower the risk. The research, presented recently at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Boston, looked at coffee consumption and the risk of three forms of skin cancer - basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and the rarer and more deadly melanoma - among about 113,000 participants in two long-term health surveys. Though easily treated through minor surgery and not typically deadly, 
House Republicans approved an egregious measure last week that would shrink access to abortion to the point of endangering women’s lives. Currently, hospitals receiving federal money must administer necessary emergency medical services to pregnant women, including abortion. However, the Protect Life Act would allow hospitals to refuse to perform an emergency abortion on religious or moral grounds even if a woman’s life was at stake. Representative Joe Pitts, the Pennsylvania Republican who introduced the bill, contends it involves no new risk to women. That is a lie. This could be life-threatening to women, especially those living in communities with only one hospital. 
Catholic hospitals alone account for about 15 percent of the nation’s hospital beds. The need to accommodate religious doctrine does not give health providers serving the general public license to deny essential care. Beyond emergency treatment, the Pitts bill would effectively ban insurance coverage for abortion in the new state health insurance exchanges set up as part of health care reform, even though the reform law already places unnecessary restrictions on insurers and the insured to make sure no federal money is used to pay for abortions. The bill would also allow states to override the health reform law’s requirement that new insurance plans cover certain preventive health services without a co-pay, potentially making birth control a target. For now, the measure has little chance of becoming law, with Democrats controlling the Senate and President Obama in the White House. But with state abortion restrictions proliferating, the bill is another warning that supporters of women’s reproductive rights need to push back a lot harder.
It has been a record year for new legislation designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote — 19 laws and two executive actions in 14 states dominated by Republicans, according to a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice. As a result, more than five million eligible voters will have a harder time participating in the 2012 election. Of course the Republicans passing these laws never acknowledge their real purpose, which is to turn away from the polls people who are more likely to vote Democratic, particularly the young, the poor, the elderly and minorities. They insist that laws requiring government identification cards to vote are only to protect the sanctity of the ballot from unscrupulous voters. Cutting back on early voting, which has been popular among working people who often cannot afford to take off from their jobs on Election Day, will save money, they claim. None of these explanations are true. There is almost no voting fraud in America. And none of the lawmakers who claim there is have ever been able to document any but the most isolated cases. The only reason Republicans are passing these laws is to give themselves a political edge by suppressing Democratic votes. 
The most widespread hurdle has been the demand for photo identification at the polls, a departure from the longstanding practice of using voters’ signatures or household identification like a utility bill. Seven states this year have passed laws requiring strict photo ID to vote, and similar measures were introduced in 27 other states. More than 21 million citizens — 11 percent of the population — do not have government ID cards. Many of them are poor, or elderly, or black and Hispanic and could have a hard time navigating the bureaucracy to get a card. In Kansas, the secretary of state, Kris Kobach (who also wrote Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law), pushed for an ID law on the basis of a list of 221 reported instances of voter fraud in Kansas since 1997. Even if that were true, it would be an infinitesimal percentage of the votes cast during that period, but it is not true. When The Wichita Eagle looked into the local cases on the list, the newspaper found that almost all were honest mistakes: a parent trying to vote for a student away at college, or signatures on mail-in ballots that didn’t precisely match those on file. In one case of supposed “fraud,” a confused non-citizen was asked at the motor vehicles bureau whether she wanted to fill out a voter registration form, and did so not realizing she was ineligible to vote. Some of the desperate Republican attempts to keep college students from voting are almost comical in their transparent partisanship. No college ID card in Wisconsin meets the state’s new stringent requirements (as lawmakers knew full well), so the elections board proposed that colleges add stickers to the cards with expiration dates and signatures. Republican lawmakers protested that the stickers would lead to — yes, voter fraud. Other states are beginning to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, or are finding other ways to make it harder to register. Some are cutting back on programs allowing early voting, or imposing new restrictions on absentee ballots, alarmed that early voting was popular among black voters supporting Barack Obama in 2008. In all cases, they are abusing the trust placed in them by twisting democracy’s machinery to partisan ends.
From Paul Krugman:
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people. When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever. It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point. 
What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right. A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts. In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis. Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand? Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. 
While I hear it’s been in the 80s in Minnesota, in Utah, we skipped right past autumn and went directly to winter:
