Week-Before-Christmas Newscake

Fruity little bits from the week-before-Christmas newscake, in which another senator with insurance ties opposes health care reform on principle (honest!), the U.S. lags in suicides, spy drones supply the Taliban and Al Qaeda with home movies and New York City seeks to bring art really up close and personal.

Mean Spirited folk accused Connecticut’s (technically) independent Senator Joe Lieberman of opposing health care reform because of ties to the insurance industry. Heck no, he’s doing it on principle, just like the latest Democrat holdout, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who has reservations about abortion funding. Those objections are absolutely unrelated to his pre-politics work experience, here quoted verbatim from his web site:

“Following his time as a student, Nelson enjoyed a successful career in insurance law. He served as CEO of the Central National Insurance Group, as chief of staff and executive vice president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and as director of the Nebraska Department of Insurance.”

---

Distracted Art Viewers may be too busy with other things to truly appreciate the artwork, but the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is looking for a new package design on the condoms it distributes. About 40 million condoms a year go to The City That Never Sleeps, perhaps explaining why. If you feel your design is truly seminal, you have until January 22 to enter it here.

---

Equal Opportunity Marches On with word from the Shady Lady Ranch, one of Nevada’s 24 legal brothels, that it may hire a male prostitute. Seems the state has approved a method of making sure male service providers are healthy, but the county still has to give its blessings. While the recession hasn’t exactly laid the brothel business flat on its back, the hope is that adding males will bring revenue spikes.

---

A transparent and open administration doesn’t seem to be a problem for the Obama folks, at least in the areas of national security. In the last four weeks, the Transportation Security Administration’s airport security manual was leaked to the internet, including color specimen IDs of those allowed to carry weapons aboard aircraft.  Earlier we  had the party crashers at Obama’s first state dinner. Now we learn that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are watching the unencrypted videos from the drone aircraft sent to spy on them.  Did no one in Washington wonder why all the villagers seemed to be waving all the time?

---

Remember Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction? Seems British intelligence was sharing with U.S. counterparts that Saddam had the weapons and could deploy them on 45 minutes’ notice. Turns out that the source for that hot intelligence was an Iraqi taxi driver retelling a conversation he remembered overhearing in the back seat of his cab some two years earlier. Newsweek has details here.

---

U.S. lags on suicides according to information released by the Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development. Roughly ten of every 100,000 Americans kill themselves, far behind Korea, Hungary, Japan and Finland, where the rate per 100,000 runs around 21 to 18. Check out the data here. Although the report doesn’t say, some speculate that fewer Americans opt for Final Checkout than other countries because the current U.S. health care system beats them to the punch. This speculation draw outrage from bootstrap conservatives who are appalled that the U.S. lags in any international category and enraged that government plays any part – even neglect – in what should be a private matter.

###