“But if we say that a mosque and community center should not be built near the perimeter of the World Trade Center site, we would compromise our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.

“We would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting. We would feed the false impressions that some Americans have about Muslims. We would send a signal around the world that Muslim Americans may be equal in the eyes of the law, but separate in the eyes of their countrymen. And we would hand a valuable propaganda tool to terrorist recruiters, who spread the fallacy that America is at war with Islam.

“Islam did not attack the World Trade Center-–Al-Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American. Today we are not at war with Islam—we are at war with Al-Qaeda and other extremists who hate freedom.

via Gawker — Gossip from Manhattan and the Beltway to Hollywood and the Valley.

Obama’s legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower administration and developed under Nixon, of a market for health care based on private insurers and employers. Eisenhower locked in the tax break for employee health benefits; Nixon pushed prepaid, competing health plans, and urged a requirement that employers cover their employees. Obama applies Nixon’s idea and takes it a step further by requiring all Americans to carry health insurance, and giving subsidies to those who need it. So don’t believe anyone who says Obama’s health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.

Robert Reich (via azspot) (via marco)

Oh, sure. Look, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way.

Mitt Romney - Romney Calls Emergency Rooms “Entirely Free Care” (via CrooksandLiars.com)

Wow.

There’s a difference between the statements ‘America has the best health-care system in the world’ and ‘With enough money, you can purchase the best health care in the world in America.’ … People should ask themselves a very simple question: Do they think they are likelier to lose their job and fall into the health-care situation of the uninsured? Or are they likelier to become an influential politician and enjoy the health-care options available to the most powerful people in the world?

If you’re a United States senator, America may have the best health-care in the world. But if you’re an ordinary person with the same vulnerability to bad luck that we all have, you’re better off being in Canada, or France, or Japan, or somewhere that doesn’t take your insurance away when Wall Street causes the economy to crash.

Ezra Klein (via savingpaper) (via brooklynmutt) (via newsweek)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to be known as the man who paints his face with the American flag and goes to Olympic curling matches and bangs a cowbell, but the original plan was to be “the man who has a tattoo of the American flag on his face and goes to any Olympic competition except for curling, figure skating, or ice dancing and blows a tuba.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: I Am the Man Who Paints His Face With the American Flag and Goes to Olympic Curling Matches and Bangs a Cowbell.

The largest boost in happiness comes from the simple act of planning a vacation. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.

After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people. How much stress or relaxation a traveler experienced on the trip appeared to influence post-vacation happiness. There was no post-trip happiness benefit for travelers who said the vacation was “neutral” or stressful.”

Surprisingly, even those travelers who described the trip as “relaxing” showed no additional jump in happiness after the trip. “They were no happier than people who had not been on holiday,” said the lead author, Jeroen Nawijn, tourism research lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

The only vacationers who experienced an increase in happiness after the trip were those who reported feeling “very relaxed” on their vacation. Among those people, the vacation happiness effect lasted for just two weeks after the trip before returning to baseline levels.

How Vacations Affect Your Happiness – Well Blog – NYTimes.com (h/t Ezra Klein)