Mother Jones // Current TV

Is Your Baseball Team's Owner a Major League Asshole?

Excerpt: "In early February, a US Patent and Trademark Office court in... more

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New Romney Video Leaked: Bain Formed to ‘Harvest’ Companies for Profit (VIDEO)

Busted Again! -- The latest video is from a 1985 CD-ROM featuring Mitt Romney... more

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Romney "47 Percent" Fundraiser Host: Hedge Fund Manager Who Likes Sex Parties

By David Corn | Mon Sep. 17, 2012 5:48 PM PDT "When Mitt Romney at a private... more

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Romney Secret Fundraising Video: Hear His "Concession Speech"

Exit stage right . . .... more

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Bain Uncovered: ‘Pro-Life’ Mitt Romney’s Big Abortion Lie

This is what makes Mitt Romney the very worst kind of politician known to man.... more

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Crock the Vote

In case you haven’t heard, the 2012 presidential election is already over and... more

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Listen to Mother: Radical Leftist or Feds’ BFF?

FOR A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national... more

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The 51 Percent Zombie Lie, Fox's Lie !

Despite Fox's propaganda that half the country doesn't pay taxes, this chart... more

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North America's Tar Sands: The New Middle East

While Tom Dispatch and Mother Jones prognosticates the details of the struggle to stop... more

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Understanding Obama ? It's Besides The Point !

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is attempting to explain Obama's strategies and... more

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Rep. Ryan Quiet on His Own Medicare Plan — By David Corn| Mon Jul. 11, 2011 12:27 PM PDT

He just can't seem to help himself. He lies in print,in the media and to the... more

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The Education of Michele Bachmann from Mother Jones Magazine

In-depth insight into one of the Republican Candidates for the 2012 Presidential... more

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Could History Repeat? We're Moving That Way

Rockefeller fires on strikers in Ludlow - a two-minute history lesson.

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From Nixon’s plumbers to James O’Keefe’s video smears: How political lying became normal

IT TAKES TWO THINGS to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution... more

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Weekly Mulch: House Republicans Push for Renewed Offshore Drilling

Ed. note: This is the final edition of the Mulch. To keep up with the best... more

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L.A. PROTECTS HOMEOWNERS, WHILE OBAMA WON'T !

Los Angeles sues Deutsche Bank for slumlord practices and contributing to the... more

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Weekly Audit: The Closing Bell

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger This week marks the final edition... more

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Weekly Pulse: Single-Payer Bills Pass Vermont Senate, House

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

The Vermont state Senate passed legislation to create a single-payer health insurance system, Paul Waldman reports for TAPPED. Since the state House has already passed a similar bill, all that’s left to do is reconcile the two pieces of legislation before the governor signs it into law.

Waldman stresses that there are still many details to work out, including how the system will be funded. Vermont might end up with a system like France’s where everyone has basic public insurance, which most people supplement with additional private coverage. The most important thing, Waldman argues, is that Vermont is moving to sever the link between employment and health insurance.

Roe showdown

Anti-choicers are gunning for a Roe v. Wade showdown in the Supreme Court before Obama can appoint any more justices. At the behest of an unnamed conservative group, Republican state Rep. John LaBruzzo of Louisiana has introduced a bill that would ban all abortions, even to save the woman’s life. The original bill upped the anti-choice ante by criminalizing not only doctors who perform abortions, but also women who procure them. LaBruzzo has since promised to scale the bill back to just criminalizing doctors. This is all blatantly unconstitutional, of course,. but as Kate Sheppard explains in Mother Jones, that’s precisely the point:

The Constitution, of course, is exactly what LaBruzzo is targeting. He admits his proposal is intended as a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional right to privacy included the right to abortions in some circumstances. LaBruzzo says he’d like his bill to become law and “immediately go to court,” and he told a local paper that an unnamed conservative religious group asked him to propose the law for exactly that purpose.

Drug pushers in your living room

Martha Rosenberg poses a provocative question at AlterNet: Does anyone remember a time before “Ask Your Doctor” ads overran the airwaves, Internet, buses, billboards, and seemingly every other medium? Direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising has become so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it was illegal until the late ’90s. In the days before DTC, drug advertising was limited to medical journals, prescription pads, golf towels, and pill-shaped stress balls distributed in doctors’ offices–which makes sense. The whole point of making a drug prescription-only is to put the decision-making power in the hands of doctors. Now, drug companies advertise to consumers for the same reason that food companies advertise to children. It’s called “pester power.”

DTC drug ads encourage consumers to self-diagnose based on vague and sometimes nearly universal symptoms like poor sleep, daytime drowsiness, anxiety, and depression. Once consumers are convinced they’re suffering from industry-hyped constructs like “erectile dysfunction” and “premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” they’re going to badger their doctors for prescriptions.

That’s not to say that these terms don’t encompass legitimate health problems, but rather that DTC markets products in such vague terms that a lot of healthy people are sure to be clamoring for drugs they don’t need. Typically, neither the patient nor the doctor is paying the full cost of the drug, so patients are more likely to ask and doctors have little incentive to say no.

Greenwashing air fresheners

A reader seeks the counsel of Grist’s earthy advice columnist Umbra on the issue of air fresheners. Some of these odor-concealing aerosols are touting themselves as green for adopting all-natural propellants. Does that make them healthier, or greener? Only marginally, says Umbra. Air fresheners still contain formaldehyde, petroleum distillates, and other questionable chemicals.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger The Vermont state Senate passed... more

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Weekly Mulch: One Year After the BP Oil Spill, None the Wiser

By Megan Hagist, Media Consortium blogger One year after the worst oil spill in... more

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Weekly Pulse: DCCC Ad Shows Grandpa Stripping for Extra Cash to Pay for Medicare

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger... more

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