Spanish Episcopal leaders say that abortion caused the global financial meltdown, kind of. (Sorry, it's in español.)
Jon Stewart on Glenn Beck.
FDL says the Medicare buy-in is a bunch of hooey.
Palin's goofy climate change bashing op ed was one of the most read Wash Post opinion pieces of the year. Not that this is surprising. It was highly controversial. If the Post had published an op ed about how to give a woman an orgasm, with pictures and embedded video, I suspect it would have been the most highly read piece of the year. Doesn't make it appropriate.
Freaky lights appear in Norwegian sky. CNN has some very cool pics.
ACLU loses its biggest donor. Says it's because of the economy, but coincidentally it happens day after his anonymity was violated by the NYT. (Thanks NYT.)
At Huffington Post, SEIU's Eliseo Medina writes about a new study from America's Voice Education Fund showing that anti-immigrant Members of Congress, who claim to support workers, actually vote against workers. Hypocrites.
Some very interesting Swine Flu numbers:
Swine flu has sickened about 50 million Americans, and killed about 10,000, according to new estimates released by federal health officials on Thursday....
Flu estimates are also difficult to compare. Seasonal flu kills about 36,000 Americans each year, according to a long-standing estimate. But that number includes many elderly people who had not only seasonal flu and related pneumonia but also heart attacks and strokes. The new CDC swine flu estimates do not include heart attacks and strokes, mainly because there hasn't been time to collect that kind of data.
So it's likely the new estimate is conservative, and undercounts elderly deaths, CDC officials acknowledged.
Even so, the number of hospitalizations and deaths of younger people from swine flu far exceed what normally occurs in the same ages from the winter flu.
