And More Again

It's a Love song.

• World News Connection to be shut down New Year's Eve.  Via Mercury Rising, which also said:

   "Open source news/intel, like open source computer code, is far less susceptible to manipulation and corruption. Guess that’s why the Open Source Center has to be done away with."

  Uh-huh.
  

• Just three stitches cost $2,229.11? Sealing a wound with skin glue, for $1,696? This is a national disgrace. In all of the haranguing about healthcare, little attention has been paid to the actual cost of simple procedures like this. When Republicans go on TV and tell everyone that we do have universal healthcare — at emergency rooms — and you see hospitals turning their ERs into “profit centers,” you’ve gotta wonder what the hell is going on. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times: where there’s shit there’s always flies.

  Southern Beale. Yes, it is now cheaper to check into the Ritz and have the doctor come to you.
• Mills River Progressive links to a .pdf of how corporate espionage, um, interacts with non-profits, activists, and an AlterNet summary of tactics used.  And tracking "authentication" has still not been derailed.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid flushes Peggy Noonan and remarks:

  A president who stakes his entire reputation on a complex scheme gone awry? And who never rides herd on the people who were supposed to make sure it went right?
  
  Hmmm, let me think....
  
  That 8-year selective amnesia about the guy before Obama is a funny thing.

• Shakesville's Melissa McEwan deconstructs a conservative's inability to understand choice and society (no, I shouldn't say that.  They understand choice if it's what they think everyone should choose, and they understand society as something where they make the rules.  They also seem to think [I use the term "think* advisedly] that tax money is supposed to support private schools, apparently having missed the word "private.").
  
  Why do I think that none of the conservatives who write that kind of swill have ever been in the armed forces or even served on a jury?