Alexander Bolton / The Hill:
Conrad drops support for North Dakota provision to avoid controversy  —  Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has asked House negotiators to scrap a provision in the reconciliation package that would have benefited his home state.  —  Conrad had won a carve-out for the Bank …

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Trada

Quick Pitch: Trada’s online marketplace boosts Google and Yahoo search ad results by crowdsourcing search expertise for small and medium businesses.

Genius Idea: Trada takes a lot of the complexity of running SEM (search engine marketing) campaigns by letting advertisers or agencies take advantage of lots of different search experts who can execute campaigns for them quickly and efficiently.

Trada is officially launching today, after being in private beta since January, 2009. The idea is pretty simple: Have advertisers or agencies lay out the parameters for a campaign, like the landing page, a budget, maximum cost per click, etc. and then have search experts work in tandem to generate keywords and ad groups that can be submitted to various ad networks like Yahoo and Google AdWords.

Once a campaign has been submitted, advertisers can monitor the keywords to see how different things are performing and to make sure that the keywords are clear and accurate. Search experts get to keep the difference in what the advertiser is willing to pay per click/conversion and what it actually cost to generate. In other words, they have a very real incentive to get as many conversions or clicks for your campaign as possible.

Trada is essentially acting as the liaison between the two groups — which means that they also offer some stability and checks and balances for both parties. Search experts have to pass an entrance exam before being accepted into the program.

Trada is free for advertisers or agencies to use — their budget and total advertising cost will vary depending on the parameters of the campaign. Search experts get to keep 75% of their profits, with 25% going to Trada.

Trada sounds like a low-cost way to try different SEM strategies and to take advantage of people that are actively working to get you conversions because it benefits them. Likewise, it might be a low-noise opportunity for search experts who don’t want to have to be tied to certain campaigns or companies and can choose what projects they work on and so-forth.

Have you ever run any search engine marketing campaigns? How did you figure out your approach? Let us know!

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: advertising, ppc, SEM, SEO, trada

McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The centrial IT group had the vision to automate "the last mile" of IT planning, the budget approval process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it's a ritual that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the cost of budgeting, and making it faster and smarter by understanding the assets, services, and service delivery of IT.

Budgeting can be painful because it can be in slow-motion. Contrast this with the real-time controls of such as VMware V-Motion and Amazon's web service console and we see a great linkup for driving process change through budgeting. And driving budgeting by cloud and virtualization. We took a look at McKesson's journey and the service catalog functions of NewScale, an IT services catalog company.

Sponsor

NewScale has customers like McKesson and Charles Schwab and competitors like HP, IBM, Tivoli. The company has been growing its customer base and helping stable-state enterprises to leverage Service Management. And that leads directly into cloud procurement.

We tracked the use case at McKesson, where the company landed at the service desk in the cloud as a means to the end in their journey to build a low-impact budget process.

We see a lot of benefit in this approach, where if successful, it would mean that the advantages to go with commodity pre-approved services dramatically improves the timing and effort of procurement. This is a lever that gives Finance a significant hand in the IT spend. Since cloud and virtualization offerings can be spun-up with service call, the cloud is well positioned to be there as budgeting and approval processes are automated.

In phase one, the company reported significant progress in moving processes towards the service catalog.

In the end, the move towards enterprise standards may be won over simplicity. Is it less clicks to provision. This means connecting the dots between processes, systems, software, teams, and policy.

To EC2, or to EC2 through Official Channels: That is the Question

IT services management comes into the picture and could make a difference in how the business and technical contributors of organizations are rewarded for moving to a standard platform.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library is tool set that has been given to IT managers to try to wrap standard language around IT service management. It gives the enterprise a common way to manage processes for IT and track the changes involved in building and operating systems.

Services platforms like Amazon and Salesforce can be considered IT disinter-mediation. We all know a IT leader out there somewhere who is funding their project by credit card out in the cloud. IT, of course, knows this also (especially since they are likely watching your network traffic). One part of the service management offering is making it even easier than Amazon. Carrot, vs. stick.

Service catalog management has the promise when it wraps things like Amazon's EC2, or VMwares offerings, gives the enterprise a way to get the same service from the web. And, with budget approval and IT approval baked in, the carrot is there.

All of IT moves towards transparency and IT processes as being measured as processes. In the ITIL community, there is discussion of the next layer of the library moving towards service delivery in the move towards ITIL Version 3. It's easy to see that "provision server" becomes fully automated. Soon, all the IT functions below it become invisible. We see this as a future cloud inflection point, where instead of there "cloud services", we are all in one.

What has been your experience in mashing ITIL, ITIL Service Delivery in your environment? Do your IT services flow like water?

Alex Seitz-Wald / Think Progress:
Rep. Steve King and Glenn Beck agree: Voting for health reform on Sunday is ‘an affront to God.’  —  With this morning's release of the Congressional Budget Office's reconciliation package score, the House appears ready to vote on health care reform this Sunday.

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Gallery: MG Project X120

Aborted plans for trio of new MG sportscar unearthed in new report originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

"j'espère ressembler à un Dieu," ce sont les mots d'Anthony Hopkins, lorsqu'il parle de Thor, l'adaptation a gros budget du comic book, dans laquelle il joue Odin.

This week, Donna Simpson announced her plan to be the fattest woman in the world. But are 'gainers' who purposefully overeat risking their health or liberating themselves?

There isn't much that Emma Allen doesn't know about dieting. She once gave up solid food for four months. It didn't work out. She tried the weight-loss programme NutriSystem, but needless to say, they didn't help either. She was even one of the first generation of Atkins devotees who were required, among other things, to test their own urine.

Yet while she was publicly attempting to shed the pounds, secretly, Emma liked being overweight. As a child she had fantasies of taking a pill that would make her fatter and fatter until she eventually just floated away.

She never told anyone, but when she got pregnant 18 years ago, everything changed. "It was like a religious epiphany," Emma says. "I remember having this incredible feeling that I could think about what was good for me, instead of calories. The possibility of thinking about food differently was a big turning point."

Over the next 10 years, Emma immersed herself in the world of size politics. She paid closer attention to the size liberation movement: a political movement that started in the 1970s and made size an axis of oppression. Groups such as Fat Underground and Fat Activists Together (FAT) fought for anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of weight. Then three years ago she finally took the decision to do something she had always wanted to do. "I'd had these fantasies all my life and had been restraining them all my life. There came a time when I wanted to explore," she says. "I wanted to know more about what they were about. How would I feel about actually gaining weight, would I enjoy it?" In spring 2007, she took the plunge and gained 33lb, to reach a total weight of 17.5st.

Emma is a 49-year-old professor at a university in the north-west of England. She is also a "gainer" – sometimes known as a "feedee" – who overeats in an active attempt to put on weight. Although there are no statistics on the number of people doing this, gaining is more common than one might think. "They are everybody: every age, every country, every size; I mean, tiny, skinny people wanting to gain . . . it really is a case of, look around you, somebody is having these fantasy scenarios," says Emma.

This week Donna Simpson, a 42-year-old mother from New Jersey who weighs 43st, made headlines by revealing that her ongoing weight gain was part of her plan to become the fattest woman on earth. Pictured with an enigmatic smile and a burger in her hand, the press coverage showed varying degrees of restraint in highlighting the £400-a-week food shops, fast-food binges and unrepentant bid to hit 73st.

Gaining is often linked to feederism; a topic that occasionally pops up as freakshow fodder in magazines, chat shows or documentaries such as Fat Girls and Feeders: a 2003 Channel 4 documentary. This focused on the relationships between men and the overweight, vulnerable women they chose to fatten to immobility and beyond. Yet many women actively seek to gain weight of their own volition.

There are many websites and groups dedicated to gaining but Fantasy Feeder (FF to its members) is perhaps the most comprehensive. There are forums, stories and photographs that show unbuttoned blouses revealing pot bellies, wobbly tummies and impressive mounds of flesh cascading over waistbands. Large bosoms escape the confines of their bras, and rolls ripple beneath over-stretched T-shirts. Before and after pictures show the usual weight transformation journey, but in reverse. The poses are proud, matter-of-fact and often sexual.

There are lots of men on the site, but it is the images of female gainers that catch the eye. In our present landscape of body blandness, they stand out as controversial, bold and visually political. Fat is still, most definitely, a feminist issue for some female gainers."I think being a feminist has affected my relationship to my body and gaining in several ways," says Emma. "I started, very young, bucking the trends of beauty norms, like bra-wearing and shaving and makeup. I always thought that these practices were ridiculous; so that made it easier to go against the norm. Gaining is very liberating."

Others say they like making a statement with their weight because it challenges our stereotypical notions of beauty. Some, like Helen Gibson, a 40-year-old nurse from the Midlands, gain weight simply to please themselves. "It is my right to be fat; nothing about making a point." Yet even she concedes putting on weight after her marriage made her feel free: "Those three months were the most liberating of my life; I could feel the fat going back on. My tummy returned to its former glory – fat, soft and flabby, just how it should be."

Helen's husband knows she is a gainer, as do friends, who are well aware of how much she "adores being fat"; understandably, though, being an NHS employee, she cannot come out of the gaining closet completely. At the latest estimate, 57% of women were classified as being overweight, including 25% who were obese. Overall, obesity and related health issues now account for 9% of the NHS budget. As a nurse, says Helen, she cannot be seen to publicly advocate being overweight. For others, anonymity is the result of not wanting anyone to know, which might explain the profusion of headless pictures on the FF website.

As any gainer will tell you, life outside the community can be harsh. There is still a huge amount of derision and discrimination towards the obese, so the decision to keep their gaining a secret isn't really a surprise. Lauren, a 20-year-old American gainer, says she does not want to offer more ammunition to people by explaining the predilection. "As a fat woman, I have experienced fat discrimination almost on a daily basis," she says. "It's usually not so glaring as an intolerant jerk screaming, 'Diet, fatty!' but smaller, more painful ways: going to parties and no one talks to me, being glared at while I'm eating in restaurants, the snickering in changing rooms in department stores."

For many non-gainers, the practice seems strange because of the health implications – both physical and psychological. Even organisations such as the US-based National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (Naafa) dismiss gaining on health grounds. Obesity experts say that being overweight can cause everything from heart problems and diabetes to high blood pressure and gall stones. The message is that fat and health don't mix. But Emma disagrees. She says that it would be more useful for people to consider the multimillion-pound diet industry and its "95% failure rate", and feels overweight people are instead blamed for all the world's ills. "I think people worry about health because it's the easiest place to hang fat hatred. The data actually suggests that it has to do with activity, and not size. People respond badly to anything that asks them to reconfigure their presumptions and preconceptions."

Psychologically, gaining is still a grey area. While one would assume purposefully overeating to gain weight is as much of a disorder as not eating, Susan Ringwood, chief executive of Beating Eating Disorders (Beat), says that isn't the case. "It isn't an eating disorder as such, because there is no morbid fear of fatness, or weight gain. In its extreme forms it is more likely to be a personality disorder that is organised around submission/domination and sexual fantasies."

Another theory, says psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, is that intentional weight gain for women could well be an avoidance tactic: they don't want to attract the unwanted attention of men, so they transform themselves into something deemed conventionally unattractive. Most women don't feel this way, but it could be true for a small minority. "I have come across cases where it's quite obvious that women deliberately become large, or remain large, for psychological reasons," he says. "These include trying to avoid attention and becoming sexually invisible. Some women use food to become so different from the stereotype and to avoid all that is involved in fitting that stereotype: from wolf whistles to being propositioned."

It's a thought, but it doesn't appear to mean anything to Emma or Helen who define weight gain in very sexual terms. Although Donna Simpson's press coverage glossed over the sexual aspect of gaining, for them, more fat means more sex appeal; the extra flesh that everyone else is attempting to shed fuels their desires.

Emma goes one step further to say that gaining is an intrinsic part of her sexual identity. She cannot gain at the moment because of MS and diabetes, but still calls herself a gainer.

For most of us, weight gain seems simple: a bit too much butter on your toast and one chocolate biscuit too many can mean the difference between zipping up your jeans or not. But the question of how to gain weight is quite a hot topic on Fantasy Feeder. There are "Eat Yourself Fat" tailormade diet plans to increase your weight, and the advice ranges from eating ice cream before bed to homemade milkshakes and lots more pasta.

While some favour junk food overload, others, like Emma, say that it is the very antithesis of what gaining is about. "For me, it's all about a kind of hedonism; it's about opening the doors and allowing in fleshy pleasures, whether it's food itself, or what happens to my body, or what happens to somebody else's body. I need a big variety, because what's appealing to me are contrasts of textures and tastes and aromas and colours . . . if I have to eat a big bowl of pasta, I'm not interested. I mean, I love pasta, but I'm not going to eat four servings of it."

Instead Emma maintains a healthy eating regime. "I know no one will believe this, but I eat lots of wholegrains, fruit and veg; probably a bit too much cheese, and chocolate – although I now only eat sugarfree candies. Fish, if it's fresh . . . of course. My diet isn't primarily McDonald's and KFC; in fact, it almost never is." Likewise, Helen's love of gaining is as much about the act of eating as the result. "It's the pleasure of food that is the biggest pleasure for me; followed by each extra roll of fat that comes with the amount that I eat," she says. "I adore how I look naked – and I have been known to spend far too much time admiring myself in the mirror."

The presence of online gaining communities has provided people with a support system. Many say it is like coming home. "This is our small part of the world where we are surrounded by people who say, 'You're not weird; it's perfectly fine to feel as you do, in fact, we think you're great because of it,'" says Lauren. "To virtually everyone, it is a liberating, wonderful feeling." Emma says that she is in the privileged position of "coming out" because she has little to lose: her partner will not leave her because of it, and she is unlikely to lose her job. Colleagues don't know, but she doesn't think they will be too surprised, given her outspoken views on fat issues.

As a moderator on the FF site, she comes across a lot of people who on the one hand are desperate to be fat, on the other, desperate to be thin. "Real desires need attention, not curing," she says. "Lots of people in the community want to understand why they have these fantasies and desires, and there's sometimes an undertone of; 'so that I can cure them'. Not always, but there are definitely people who feel that way."

Some, she says, are just as unhappy with their bodies as those trying to lose weight. "Most people who tell you that they're happy with their bodies are lying. There are people who are like, 'Yeah, I'm cool: fat is beautiful – I'm having weight loss surgery . . . certainly, there are women on FF who are dieting."

Being a gainer isn't as straightforward or easy as it might seem, she says. "One comes into contact with messages about weight loss, health and beauty, about, I don't know, 20 times a day. Every time you open your email, a magazine, every time you turn the television on . . . so any attempt to do anything different, takes incredible strength and courage – and we all fall down," including Emma. "Of course it gets me down! I often feel like all men – and women – believe that stereotype is beautiful, even though I know better," she says. "I hammer myself over not being that stereotype, but only when I'm having a bad time and am already vulnerable because of other things going on around me."

If we look around us, says Phillip Hodson, it is clear that regardless of increased pressures to be thin, we are getting fatter as a nation. "The natural figure of the hunter-gatherer has returned: good childbearing hips and a good abdomen," he says. "But I would be worried about people who are saying they want to get fat."

But Helen is not worried. At 16st she still only considers herself to be pleasantly plump. She has a picture in her head, she says, of what she will look like when she is fat. "I am a long way off that, although I am on my way," she says. "With each mouthful, calorie and year, I am on my way to achieving it."

Some names have been changed

• Women
• Obesity
• Health & wellbeing

“I don’t think anyone has any real confidence that Government will act to restrain its spending, or plan to work down the debt without strangling the community with taxes”: Bermuda's budget debate has eroded Vexed Bermoothes‘ confidence.

Fox News immediately responded to cost estimates of health care reform legislation by devoting far more attention to the estimate that the legislation would increase spending by $940 billion over 10 years than it did to the estimate that, including cost savings and revenue increases, the bill would actually reduce the deficit by $130 billion over the same period. On-screen graphics throughout Fox News' initial coverage referred to the cost estimate, while no graphics mentioned deficit reduction.

Fox shows nearly 10 minutes of on-screen graphic spelling out $940 billion cost estimate, none on deficit reduction. During the 9 a.m. ET hour -- when reports of the Congressional Budget Office's preliminary cost analysis of health care reform legislation first leaked -- Fox News repeatedly aired an on-screen graphic stating, "CBO: Health Care Will Cost $940 Billion Over 10 Yrs," showing the graphic for a total of 9 minutes, 44 seconds. At no time during the 9 a.m. hour did Fox News show a graphic referring to the $130 billion deficit-reduction estimate.

Cost estimate mentioned three times as often as deficit-reduction estimate. During the 9 a.m. hour, the $940 billion cost estimate was mentioned 12 times -- by co-hosts Bill Hemmer (three times) and Martha MacCallum (twice), Fox News contributors Karl Rove (twice) and Juan Williams, guests Joe Trippi and Kevin Madden, and by Rep. John Boehner (twice) during Fox coverage of the GOP press conference in response to the CBO estimate. By contrast, CBO's estimate that the bill would reduce the deficit was mentioned only four times -- by Hemmer, Williams, and Rove, and by Rep. James Clyburn during Fox coverage of the Democratic press conference in response to the CBO estimate.

Filed under: Budget, Europe, Hatchback, Suzuki

Gallery: Suzuki Swift Sport "Rock am Ring" edition

Suzuki Germany releases special Nürburgring edition Swift Sport - sort of originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

White House press secretary deflects report that president said fate of his administration was at stake

Barack Obama was today forced to postpone a trip to Australia, Indonesia and Guam in order to be in Washington for what he hopes will be the passage on Sunday of his healthcare bill, the biggest piece of domestic legislation on his agenda.

The trip had already been delayed and shortened because of the bill. As the timetable on its passage slipped further, the White House bowed to what had become almost inevitable and pulled out of the trip. It is to be rescheduled for June.

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told a press conference that it would be bad manners to wait until Sunday morning to tell the Australian and Indonesian leaders he was not coming.

Gibbs expressed confidence that the bill will be passed. He refused to confirm or deny a report that Obama told a group of Democratic members of Congress earlier this week that the fate of his presidency rested on passage of the bill.

Although a handful of Democrats who voted against an earlier version of the bill in the House gave their support in the past 48 hours, the Democrats do not yet have the necessary 216 votes for it to pass.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was given a boost today as she lobbied fellow Democrats to support the bill. The Congressional budget office put the cost of health reform at $940bn over 10 years, marginally lower than had been expected and possibly low enough to be acceptable to Democratic fiscal conservatives.

The budget office estimated the reform would reduce the federal deficit by $138bn over its first 10 years and $1.2tn in the second decade. Obama has been battling for more than a year to pass the legislation, which would extend healthcare insurance to more than 30 million Americans.

• US healthcare
• Barack Obama
• US domestic policy
• US politics
• United States
• Australia
• Indonesia

Ezra Klein:
CBO: Health-care reform bill cuts deficit by $1.3 trillion over 20 years, covers 95%  —  Washington has spent the past week or so waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to release its preliminary estimate of the Senate bill with the reconciliation fixes.

Academics have been suffering from the move to restructure universities into business enterprises for years

The Higher Education Council for England has just announced £500m worth of cuts in higher education. Everyone expects these to be only the beginning of a brutal squeeze in state spending on universities over the next few years.

But the cuts are already a reality. In my own university, King's College London, management is seeking to reduce salary costs by 10% in the next two years. Like all academic staff in the arts and humanities school, I have had my job declared "at risk of redundancy" as part of the effort to eliminate 22 teaching posts in the school. This has caused an international furore and great damage to the reputation of King's. Members of the University and College Union are currently voting in a strike ballot against the redundancies.

This conflict – and others like it at, for example, Leeds and Sussex universities – must be seen against the background of the neoliberal transformation of universities over the past three decades. This has involved the internalisation of the logic of competition, so that universities, departments and individual academics are all pushed to treat each other as rivals in the struggle for resources. The recently rebranded Research Excellence Framework – an Orwellian name if ever there was one – has been a key mechanism in this process.

This has gone alongside the restructuring of universities into business enterprises organised along managerial lines. Since 2003 the number of managers in higher education has risen by 33%, while academics have increased only by 10%. The metamorphosis of vice-chancellors into CEOs, expecting to be paid accordingly (as the figures published in Monday's Guardian show), is part of the same process. One of the driving forces of the staff rebellion at King's has been the anger provoked by this new managerial regime.

The rationale for this reorganisation is to a significant extent the reorientation of academic research to the direct benefit of business – a policy recommended by Richard Lambert, now director general of the Confederation of British Industry, in a review for the Treasury in 2003 and summed up by Charles Clarke when he was education secretary as "harnessing knowledge to wealth creation". How cutting back on higher education is supposed to achieve this objective is anybody's guess.

This points to the larger paradox of the cuts. They are intended to reduce the budget deficit, which has hugely increased thanks to the government rescue of the banks. Now the surviving banks are campaigning for the deficit to be cut by shrinking the public sector. But academics, along with other public sector workers, had absolutely nothing to do with causing the financial crash that necessitated the rescues. The cuts are a class project for displacing the costs of the economic and financial crisis onto those who produce and consume public services.

Central to the ideology of the neoliberal university is the conception of students as consumers whose needs are sovereign. This is no way corresponds to reality, since the most prestigious institutions (for example, the Russell Group) give priority to research, while poorer universities are required to teach unmanageable numbers of students. At King's we are expected to absorb cuts in staff but "to continue to improve the student experience".

Many students recognise these goals are mutually inconsistent. At Sussex University students have mounted occupations in support of staff opposition to the cuts. At King's students have been campaigning around the slogan "We support our teachers". Out of the solidarity that is developing between academics and students we may see the beginnings of a new and more democratic university system.

• University administration
• University funding
• King's College London
• University teaching
• Higher education
• Financial crisis
• Education policy

HotAir.com blogger Cassy Fiano criticized President Obama for standing by a provision in the health care bill that provides funding for states that have suffered natural disasters and stated, "I just don't see how disaster relief has anything to do with health care." In fact, the funding is tied to health care because it would fix gaps in federal Medicaid payments that some states -- such as Louisiana and Hawaii -- have experienced as a result of recent disasters.

From Fiano's March 17 HotAir.com post:

This moment, from Bret Baier's interview on Fox News with Obama, might just be one of the biggest "WTF?!" moments from Obama's presidency yet. Obama is either completely making things up, living in an alternate reality, or really, really confused.

Actually, my guess is that's it's probably a combination of all three.

OBAMA [video]: I'll give you some exceptions, though. Something that was called a special deal was for Louisiana. It was said that there were billions of dollars -- millions of dollars going to Louisiana, this was a special deal. Well, in fact, that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help. Louisiana obviously went through Katrina, and they're still trying to deal with the enormous challenges that were faced because of that. ... That also -- well, I'm giving you an example of one that I consider important. It also affects Hawaii, which went through an earthquake. So that's not just a Louisiana provision. That is a provision that affects every state that is going through a natural catastrophe.

Apparently, there was a devastating earthquake in Hawaii that we all somehow missed.

Oh, wait, no. That's right. There was no earthquake, and Obama is just totally clueless, as usual. In fact, the last earthquake in Hawaii to cause any deaths at all was in 1975, and two people died.

In any case, why is he using this argument, anyways? He's turned this health care bill into a one-size-fits-all solution for everything. Not only will it fix our health care, but it will apparently create jobs and give disaster relief around the country!

Maybe I'm the only person who doesn't get it, but I just don't see how disaster relief has anything to do with health care. This is just more evidence that Obama is just talking out of his you-know-where now. He's become this desperate. And you know, I say good. That means we're getting to him, and now's the time to push even harder.

Funding would fix FMAP rates for "certain states recovering from a major disaster." The Senate bill as passed includes a provision -- often referred to as the "Louisiana Purchase" by conservative media -- that would adjust the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) rate for "certain states recovering from a major disaster." The bill requires that it only applies to states "for which, at any time during the preceding 7 fiscal years, the President has declared a major disaster" and "determined as a result of such disaster that every county or parish in the State warrant individual and public assistance or public assistance from the Federal Government."

The Department of Health and Human Services states that FMAP is "used in determining the amount of Federal matching funds for State expenditures for assistance payments for certain social services, and State medical and medical insurance expenditures. The Social Security Act requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to calculate and publish the FMAPs each year."

Times-Picayune: Temporary post-Katrina spending "spiked" per capita income "long enough" to skew Medicaid funding formula, causing state Medicaid funding shortfall. The Times-Picayune reported on January 22 that "FMAP refers to the percentage of a state's payments under Medicaid that are covered by the federal government. Louisiana usually gets a higher match because of how poor the state is, but because of all the recovery and rebuilding money that poured in after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, state per capita income spiked long enough to throw the formula out of kilter and threaten to blow a hole [in] the state budget. [Sen. Mary] Landrieu's fix was, according to state officials, only the beginning of a solution for a huge Medicaid shortfall the state is facing." The article stated that Landrieu said "attaching the Medicaid provision to a health-care bill made sense, and there is no obvious and feasible legislative alternative."

Jindal: "If not corrected in Washington, D.C.," FMAP problem will cost $500 million a year. Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal's fiscal year 2010-2011 budget proposal says that the "Louisiana state government faces significant, multi-year budget challenges, compounded by a faulty federal FMAP formula that, if not corrected in Washington, D.C., will cost the state approximately $500 million a year in Medicaid funding, impacting services for the poorest in our state, and often those who need care the most." The proposal also says that "[w]hile there is discussion in Washington about extending the enhanced federal Medicaid match rate for six months for all states, without a permanent fix to Louisiana's faulty FMAP calculation, combined with the loss of federal stimulus funding, Louisiana will still face a projected $1.7 billion shortfall for FY 12."

Hawaii was declared a disaster area following earthquake. During the Fox News interview cited by HotAir, Obama stated that Hawaii could benefit from the health care bill provision that helps Louisiana deal with the FMAP problem. The HotAir post responded: "Apparently, there was a devastating earthquake in Hawaii that we all somehow missed. Oh, wait, no. That's right. There was no earthquake, and Obama is just totally clueless, as usual." In fact, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake hit Hawaii on October 15, 2006, as Media Matters for America noted. At the time, President Bush "declared a major disaster exists in the State of Hawaii and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts in the area struck by an earthquake." USA Today also reported that Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle also issued a disaster declaration for the state, after reports of damaged buildings, landslides, and power outages.

Times-Picayune: Hawaii might also be eligible for aid under health care reform. The Times-Picayune reported on February 23 that the provision "was intended as a one-time, partial fix for a sharp drop in federal Medicaid money coming to the state because of a temporary surge in per capita income in Louisiana as recovery dollars flooded into the state in the wake of Katrina and Rita." The article noted that Hawaii could also be eligible for aid under the Senate health care reform bill:

In order to qualify, a state would have to face an FMAP decline of a magnitude that would only include at this time three states: Louisiana, North Dakota and Hawaii. The legislation also requires the state be one that experienced a major disaster in the past seven years in which every county or parish in the state was eligible for FEMA public assistance. That would eliminate North Dakota, leaving only Louisiana and Hawaii, where all four of its counties were eligible for aid after the 2006 earthquake.

Hawaii officials reportedly pursuing FMAP funding. A March 11 Times-Picayune article quoted a Hawaii Department of Human Services spokeswoman as saying they are "optimistic we will find a way to get the FMAP provision," amid some confusion over whether Hawaii will ultimately qualify for the fix.

The Hill:
CBO: Health package costs $940 billion; Hoyer says vote will come on Sunday  —  Democrats are lauding a CBO report that found their healthcare package will cut the deficit by $130 billion.  —  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer hailed the figures from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office during …

Carrie Budoff Brown / The Politico:
CBO numbers  —  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) just released the first set of Congressional Budget Office numbers to reporters this morning.  —  The bill would cost $940 billion, and reduce the deficit by $130 billion over the first 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years.

• Net piracy puts 1.2m EU jobs in peril, study shows
• Internet piracy taking big toll on jobs
• Illegal-file sharing could 'cost billions' by 2015
• Piracy threatens Europe's creative industries
• EU must take 'urgent' action on piracy, report warns

• The report suggests that there's a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.
• The report makes another bogus assumption by stating that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality files which are greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.
• The report cites some academic literature which suggests that piracy leads to a decrease in sales. Studies that reported the opposite or a null-effect were carefully left out. This bias defines the entire outcome of the report. If they used studies that found a positive effect they would have found that piracy would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the years to come.
• The report uses fixed substitution rates. They assume that 10 downloaded albums results in one lost sale and this figure is not adjusted for the projected increase in piracy. One would think that the public's budget for entertainment is limited and that the substitution rate would go down as piracy goes up.
• Related to the previous point, if the industry did indeed lose over €240 billion in revenue by 2015, consumers would have a lot of extra cash to spend. Depending on where this money was spent it might create more jobs than the entertainment industry claims it is losing. As a report commissioned by the Dutch Government showed last year, the overall effect of piracy on the economy might actually be positive.
• It gets even more ridiculous when we take a closer look at the claims. In the UK consumers spent €6.3 on audiovisual products. If the projected trends continued, the 'lost' revenue because of piracy would exceed the actual revenue, meaning that the music and movie industries would end up having to pay people for pirating their products.
• Lastly, the researchers seem to have trouble putting a decent report together as they messed up the legend of one of the critical figures. In this figure the bars for "file-sharing" and "global Internet traffic" are switched around. This makes us skeptical about the other statistics that are published in the report.

Google's Matt Cutts explains how search works in layman's terms originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.