Nutrition and lead poisoning prevention. Since many water systems may expose

people to some lead, this is good information for everyone to know.

Not everyone with the same blood level of lead is going to absorb the same amount into their body. Some people EXCRETE more lead out of their bodies, and some retain more.

Good nutrition is key. Children and adults who are malnourished are more likely to absorb lead into their bones and tissues. Well nourished people are more likely to pass it out of their bodies, in their urine.

So the poor children in Flint were doubly disadvantaged.

Also, a blood level test today only gives a "snapshot" of your current lead level. If it is low today, that doesn't mean it was low 6 months ago. So current testing in Flint doesn't show how many children were exposed to high levels of lead while they were drinking the bad water.

http://dhhs.ne.gov/publichealth/Pages/LeadNutrition.aspx

Nutrition and Lead Poisoning Prevention

Nutrition can play a pivotal role in preventing childhood lead poisoning. It is important to help minimize the amount of lead that is absorbed and stored in the bones. Good nutrition helps accomplish this goal. A child's body requires certain minerals, especially calcium and iron. When these minerals are deficient in the body, lead absorption is increased. Children whose diet is deficient in these minerals retain more of the lead than they would have otherwise.

Regular Meals

An empty stomach absorbs more lead. By feeding your child healthy meals and snacks each day, it will help his or her body to absorb less lead.

Foods Rich in Iron

Children need to have plenty of iron in their system. To the body, iron and lead look very similar. When there is more iron than lead, the body will absorb the iron. The following foods are rich in iron:

Iron-fortified cereals
Green leafy vegetables
Pureed meats
Lean red meats
Tuna, salmon, fish
Raisins, dates, and prunes
Dried beans and peas
Skinless poultry
Nuts or sunflower seeds
Foods Rich in Calcium

Foods that are high in calcium can also help the body absorb less lead. The following foods are rich in calcium:

Milk and milk products
Cheese and Yogurt
Green leafy vegetables
Calcium-enriched orange juice
Tofu
Salmon
Peanuts
Foods Rich in Vitamin C

Vitamin C will help the body absorb more iron and calcium. The following foods are rich in Vitamin C:

Oranges and tangerines
Grapefruit
Limes and lemons
Strawberries
Cantaloupe
Kiwi
Potatoes and sweet potatoes
Tomatoes
Broccoli
Bell peppers


Foods to Avoid

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[MORE AT LINK}

WA Post: For Trump, it's always about CONTROL.

Sanders message sounds fresh and new and exciting

to young people.

To many older, equally progressive but battle worn Democrats, it sounds sadly familiar.

There are at least two reasons he has much less support among older voters: George McGovern and Walter Mondale. Older voters in the party learned a very bitter lesson, as a result of two elections that we lost by 49 states to 1.

A very idealistic Senator from a small state, George McGovern had a lot in common with Bernie Sanders. He spoke out against the Vietnam war, as Bernie spoke out against Iraq. And he was for universal healthcare and other strong social programs, including a guaranteed minimum standard of living. And he had millions of young, passionate supporters.

Walter Mondale was also very progressive and, like Bernie, very honest with the voters. He explained that he had a plan to reduce the deficit and invest in the future that would result in slightly higher middle class taxes, but that the investments made would result in the best educated generation in history. He also warned the voters that Reagan had a secret plan to raise taxes that would shift the burden off high income taxpayers and onto the middle class – which is exactly what it did.

But it didn’t matter. The voters chose the candidate who falsely promised not to raise their taxes – not the honest one who acknowledged that taxes would rise.

“The lesson battle-hardened Democrats of that era learned was that they could never again openly call for tax increases on middle-income households.”

Now Bernie thinks we can ignore that lesson, and he’s backed by millions of fervent believers who think everything’s different now.

Many of the rest of us have to hope we’re not watching history repeat itself.

49 states to one. It was a sickening experience, both times. And it could happen again.

http://archive.argusleader.com/article/20121021/MCGOVERN/121021003/The-1972-campaign-slide-defeat

The term “McGovern liberal,” emanated from that ’72 campaign largely because of what McGovern campaigned for: ending the war, cutting defense spending, guaranteeing a certain standard of living in return for welfare reform, and universal health care.

“McGovern did have a very liberal oriented platform at that time,” said Bob Burns, a former political science professor at South Dakota State University.

In shorthand, it can be retold in the attack lines from then-Vice President Spiro Agnew, who would attack the South Dakota senator as the candidate of “amnesty, abortion and acid.”

Nixon’s campaign, with Agnew often leading the way, portrayed McGovern as a dangerous leftist, whose policies would leave America more vulnerable to the Soviet threat, more encumbered by a growing state influence at home, and more likely to tread softly around the drug cultural and sexual revolution of the young people who supported him.

http://blogs.reuters.com/reihan-salam/2012/09/06/obama-and-the-ghost-of-walter-mondale/

Rather than make the most anodyne, ultra-cautious, poll-tested argument he and his team could conjure up, he told the truth as he understood it. “Mr. Reagan will raise your taxes,” he told the assembled delegates. “And so will I.”

Mondale lambasted Reagan for his secret tax plan that would “sock it to average-income families” and “leave his rich friends alone,” just as critics of the Romney-Ryan ticket have alleged that the GOP’s conspicuously vague tax reform ideas would almost certainly mean shifting the tax burden downward.

Yet the really interesting part of Mondale’s tax plan that year is that it didn’t just raise taxes on America’s highest-earning households. In an era of relatively high inflation, during which “bracket creep” was a big concern for middle-income families, he called for limiting the indexing of tax brackets for roughly half of all households, a step that raised most of the revenue he hoped to generate from individual taxpayers. There were, to be sure, steeper tax increases for high-income households, but Mondale maintained that all non-poor families should chip in to tackle yawning deficits and to make the investments he believed were necessary to foster “the best-educated, best-trained generation in American history.”

That fall, of course, Mondale suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of a sunny, upbeat Ronald Reagan, who, as it turned out, really did raise taxes in his second term.

SNIP

The lesson battle-hardened Democrats of that era learned was that they could never again openly call for tax increases on middle-income households. Bill Clinton, at the time the conspicuously young governor of Arkansas, took the lesson to heart when he pledged during his 1992 presidential run to cut taxes on middle-income households and to raise them on households earning over $250,000. The Clinton administration did succeed in persuading a Democratic Congress to raise the two top marginal tax rates on ordinary income as part of its 1993 budget deal. In his second term, however, President Clinton agreed to a deep cut in capital gains taxes backed by a Republican Congress in 1997, a move that helped fuel the investment boom of that era. Clinton had successfully reinvented the Democrats, GOP protestations notwithstanding, as a low-tax party.

Recognizing the success of Clinton’s tax pledge, then-candidate Barack Obama made the same promise, even using the same $250,000 threshold, despite the fact that $250,000 in 1992 would have been worth roughly $380,000 in 2008. The bigger difference between 1992 and 2008 was that the Bush-era tax cuts meant that there was far less scope for cutting the taxes paid by middle-income households.

The tax overhauls of the Clinton and Bush years had made the federal income tax highly progressive. To be sure, factoring in payroll taxes and state and local taxes makes the overall U.S. tax burden considerably less progressive. But the tax systems in most affluent democracies are actually slightly regressive, as they rely more heavily on national consumption taxes to fund universal social programs. The central virtue of these tax systems is that they undermine work incentives less than progressive tax systems that rely heavily on high marginal tax rates.

Why is Bernie lying? He knows Glass-Stegall had very little to do with

the crash of 2008. That crash was caused by the shadow banking industry that wasn't affected by Glass-Stegall. That industry didn't even EXIST during the Glass-Stegall era.

If you don't believe me, do you believe Elizabeth Warren? She acknowledges that Glass-Stegall wouldn't have prevented the crash.

I guess Bernie's just another politician after all.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/reinstating-an-old-rule-is-not-a-cure-for-crisis/?_r=0

Bringing back something akin to Glass-Steagall would clearly help limit risk in the system. And that’s a very good and worthy goal. Letting banks sell securities and insurance products and services allowed them to grow too big too fast, and fueled a culture that put profit and pay over prudence.

But here’s the key: Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have prevented the last financial crisis. And it probably wouldn’t have prevented JPMorgan’s $2 billion-plus trading loss. The loss occurred on the commercial side of the bank, not at the investment bank. But parts of the bet were made with synthetic credit derivatives — something that George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” would never have touched.

When I called Ms. Warren and pressed her about whether she thought the financial crisis or JPMorgan’s losses could have been avoided if Glass-Steagall were in place, she conceded: “The answer is probably ‘No’ to both.”


http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/050515/did-repeal-glasssteagall-act-contribute-2008-financial-crisis.asp

The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was a minor contributor to the financial crisis, if it contributed to the crisis at all. At the heart of the 2008 financial crisis was nearly $5 trillion worth of basically worthless mortgage loans. Since non-bank lenders originated the overwhelming majority of these mortgages, an attempt to blame the financial crisis on a failure of banking regulation represents a logical disconnect from the facts of the situation.

The portion of the repealed Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 on which some economists try to pin the blame for the financial crisis is the part that prevented banks from operating as both commercial or retail banks and investment banks. The theory is that allowing banks to act in both the commercial and investment fields somehow was responsible for the creation of all the mortgage-backed derivatives that were eventually shown to be worth less than the paper on which they were written. This theory cannot be supported by the facts, however. The buyers of over half of the subprime mortgages in the 10 years leading up to the 2008 crisis were not banks – either commercial, investment or both – but Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Many of the mortgage-backed derivatives were created and sold by banks, but there is virtually no connection between that fact and the Glass-Steagall Act. Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, along with Goldman Sachs, were all major players in the subprime mortgage meltdown, but none of these investment banks had ever taken advantage of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and ventured into commercial banking. They were strictly investment banks, just as they had been before Glass-Steagall was repealed.

CharityWatch gives the Clinton Foundation an "A" rating, and lists it as

one of the two highest-rated charities in the category of "Peace and International Relations."

Despite what you may hear from some quarters, the Clintons have donated millions to the foundation -- they don't take salaries from it.


https://www.charitywatch.org/about-charitywatch/charitywatch-difference/3113/3118

The question Bernie never answers: how does he expect to get anything done?

We're less than 10 months from the General election. There's no sign that we'll have wholesale change in the House, so it will remain controlled by the Republicans. There is a chance we could possibly retake the Senate, but we won't have a filibuster-proof majority there.

So how does Bernie expect to follow through on his promises? He's the person who says that real change only happens from the bottom, not from the top. So how does he think a revolutionary new Democrat at the top will succeed without strong support in Congress?

We know how Hillary or Martin would proceed -- through deal making and compromise. Bernie has no background or interest in either.

So how is he going to accomplish anything significant? Unless he starts acting like the kind of politicians he despises?

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bernie-sanders-answer/story?id=36499530

At almost every one of his town halls around the country, someone in the audience asks the Vermont senator a question centered on that idea: How will he get it all done? Many of them bring up the big ambitions that President Obama had when he ran. How could Sanders, with campaign promises even more progressive than Obama’s, accomplish what the president could not?

“How realistic do you think this is to get all of this done?” Devyn Harris, for example, asked the senator in Hooksett, New Hampshire, on Thursday. “You are fighting against a Republican-controlled Congress.”

Sanders often cuts the questioner short, just slightly, like he did to Harris, once he realizes the thrust of their inquiry. He knows his answer on this topic, it always the same and it goes something like this:

“If you know history you know that nothing ever changes from the top on down, it is always from the bottom on up,” he began in Hooksett. “If we were sitting here 20 years ago and someone jumped up and said you know I think that gay marriage will be legal in every state in this country, the response would have been, ‘What are you smoking?’ Today, gay marriage is legal and for many young people it is not even an issue any more."

GOOD NEWS: Tim Eyman's latest monstrosity, approved by the voters in November,

was just ruled unconstitutional.

http://mynorthwest.com/1087/2898045/Tim-Eyman-felt-like-Charlie-Brown-after-judge-ruled-against-initiative

King County Superior Court Judge William Downing ruled that Initiative 1366 was unconstitutional and void. The measure, approved by voters in November, would have cut the sales tax by one percent in April if the Legislature didn't allow a public vote on an amendment that would require a two-thirds supermajority for tax increases.

Eyman was "brimming with confidence." He told AM 770 KTTH's Todd Herman that he believed no judge – with a straight face – could find the initiative unconstitutional. But after Judge Downing ruled it down Eyman said he felt a little like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football.

"I had faith there was no way you could come to another conclusion," he told Herman. "And this judge came to another conclusion."

Eyman was testifying before a Senate panel considering a two-thirds constitutional amendment when he received a text from his lawyer informing him of the judge's ruling.

Sundance movie about Barack & Michelle's first date (reposted from BOG)

Sundance Movie: "Southside with You" Barack & Michelle's first date.

SoS Clinton to UN: "Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights."

Hillary's groundbreaking speech to the UN in 2011 -- in addition to her current legislative priorities -- may have a lot to do with today's endorsement from the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT organization in the country.

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/06/383003/sec-clinton-to-un-gay-rights-are-human-rights-and-human-rights-are-gay-rights/

Recognizing that America’s own record on LGBT equality is “far from perfect,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on nations around the world to recognize that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights,” during a speech in Geneva, Switzerland this afternoon. Clinton’s address builds on a memorandum President Obama issued earlier today directing all agencies to “promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons.”

Clinton also announced that the administration is launching a $3 million global equality fund to support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world. The fund will help human rights groups “record facts so they can target their advocacy, learn how to use the law as a tool, manage their budgets, train their staffs and forge partnerships with women’s organizations and other Human Rights groups,” Clinton said.

Some highlights from the speech:
– “Like being a woman, like being a racial religious tribal or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are gay rights.”
– “Well, in reality, gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes, and whether we know it or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends and our neighbors.”
– “Some believe homosexuality is a Western phenomenon… but gay people belong to every society in the world…. Being gay is not a Western invention, it is a human reality.”
– “In all countries, there are costs to not protecting these rights, in both gay and straight lives lost to disease and violence and the silencing of voices and views that would strengthen communities and ideas never pursued by entrepreneurs who happen to be gay. Costs are incurred whenever any group is treated as lesser or the other whether they are women, racial or religious minorities or the LGBT.”

SNIP