Organizing for America | BarackObama.com

47 million Americans are without Health Care Insurance and the "system" is controlled by insurance companies whose behavior is driven by greed.. These "companies" control our health care process. There are doctors who care and want to return to being doctors ...not medical insurance clerks...

She's just that cool...sit back and relax - Jazz Cat Patricia Barber-"gotcha" and "use me up"

The Dream Shall Never Die-Compassion. Not Politics.

"that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American...will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not just a privilege."

Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies-He made a Difference. Stood for Truth.

“Edward M. Kennedy – the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply – died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port,” the statement said. “We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever.”

Mr. Kennedy had been in precarious health since he suffered a seizure in May 2008. His doctors determined the cause had been a malignant glioma, a brain tumor that often carries a grim prognosis.

As he underwent cancer treatment, Mr. Kennedy was little seen in Washington, appearing most recently at the White House in April as Mr. Obama signed a national service bill that bears the Kennedy name. Last week Mr. Kennedy urged Massachusetts lawmakers to change state law and let Gov. Deval Patrick appoint a temporary replacement upon his death, to assure that the state’s representation in Congress would not be interrupted by a special election.

While Mr. Kennedy had been physically absent from the capital in recent months, his presence had been deeply felt as Congress weighed the most sweeping revisions to America’s health care system in decades, an effort Mr. Kennedy called “the cause of my life.”

On July 15, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, which Mr. Kennedy headed, passed health care legislation, although the battle over the proposed overhaul is now consuming Capitol Hill..

Mr. Kennedy was the last surviving brother of a generation of Kennedys that dominated American politics in the 1960s and that came to embody glamour, political idealism and untimely death. The Kennedy mystique — some call it the Kennedy myth — has held the imagination of the world for decades and came to rest on the sometimes too-narrow shoulders of the brother known as Teddy.

Mr. Kennedy, who served 46 years as the most well-known Democrat in the Senate, longer than all but two other senators, was the only one of those brothers to die after reaching old age. President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were felled by assassins’ bullets in their 40s. The eldest brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., died in 1944 at the age of 29 while on a risky World War II bombing mission.

Mr. Kennedy spent much of last year in treatment and recuperation, broken by occasional public appearances and a dramatic return to the Capitol last summer to cast a decisive vote on a Medicare bill.

He electrified the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August with an unscheduled appearance and a speech that had delegates on their feet. Many were in tears.

His gait was halting, but his voice was strong. “My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, it is so wonderful to be here, and nothing is going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America, to restore its future, to rise to our best ideals and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States.”

Senator Kennedy was at or near the center of much of American history in the latter part of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. For much of his adult life, he veered from victory to catastrophe, winning every Senate election he entered but failing in his only try for the presidency; living through the sudden deaths of his brothers and three of his nephews; being responsible for the drowning death on Chappaquiddick Island of a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to his brother Robert. One of the nephews, John F. Kennedy Jr., who the family hoped would one day seek political office and keep the Kennedy tradition alive, died in a plane crash in 1999 at age 38.

Mr. Kennedy himself was almost killed, in 1964, in a plane crash, which left him with permanent back and neck problems.

He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy.

-The New York Times

Great Music!

My Home Town...NYC Time Lapse HD and Music by Moby

New York city portrait, HD time lapse, April 2006, music by Moby from Max Moos on Vimeo.

Take Good Care of our Mother

Global warming has quickly become one of the most heated issues in America (~)). Rising temperatures and melting icebergs are indisputable evidence that the Earth is warming, but is this global heat wave a man-made crisis or just overblown hype?

Greenhouse gases emitted by humans for the past 150 years will continue to warm the planet for generations even if we stop fossil-fuel combustion today. Unfortunately, anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emission rates are still rising. Worldwide, emissions rose 70 percent between 1970 and 2005. Emissions will rise by a projected 25 to 90 percent by 2030. China in particular continues to build new coal-fired power plants on a weekly basis.

The planet has warmed about .74 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years, according to the IPCC. Eleven of the 12 years between 1995 and 2006 were the warmest since global temperature records were first kept in 1850. As a result, polar ice caps are collapsing at alarming rates. Since 1978, the Arctic ice has shrunk 2.7 percent per decade, according to the IPCC. A separate study that recently surveyed 30 glaciers from around the world observed them melting at record rates; an average rate of loss was 4.9 feet in 2006. That’s compared to an average loss of about a foot a year between 1980 and 1999.

There are four things in addition to natural-system restoration that will save the planet: urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. It is time to reexamine many of the central ideas of the Green Movement, and that urban living uses resources more efficiently, that old-style farming is not sustainable given present climatic conditions, and that nuclear power has proven its effectiveness and safety in other countries.

CumulusMedical Introduction Video

Serious About Marketing and Affiliate Programs?

Wealthy Affiliate is the fastest growing Internet marketing community online and it's goal is to be the best resource available to aspiring, intermediate, and expert Internet marketers.

WA was created in September 2005 as a site dedicated for creating keyword lists. This quickly evolved into a much more comprehensive website offering Internet Marketing resources, tools, a forum, and full one-on-one support.

The traditional psyche of many great Internet marketers was to hide their secrets. WA promotes information sharing as they believe that there is opportunity for everyone online. There really are no secrets.

A little time on Twitter and you sure see the power of the "get rich quick scams". This program is geared toward realistic expectations and is certainly worth investigating..

Our Health Care System Is Broken

Our health care system is broken, and American families and businesses urgently need a solution.

-Forty-Seven million Americans are Uninsured.
-Premiums are growing four times faster than wages. My wife and I pay $500 a month for very little coverage. We are fortunate..
-Half of all personal bankruptcies stem from medical expenses.

President Obama has challenged Congress to pass real health care reform in 2009 that upholds three basic principles:
1-Reduce costs by improving efficiency and investing in preventative care.
2-Guarantee every American the right to choose their plan and doctor-including a public insurance option.
3-Ensure quality, affordable care for every American.

Congress must pass real health care reform in 2009.

Drug companies, Insurance Companies and other middlemen have made it impossible for a good Doctor to care properly for his or her patients. My father was one of them who just became so disgusted at our "system" that he stopped seeing patients years ago. He was a good doctor, who cared about patients first and profits second. He made House Calls. The current system is built around a "Deny, Deny and Hope they die" system.
It is truly time for a change.

Sincerely,
Paul Goss
Chairman and CEO
CumulusMedical.com

Twitter-click to follow me

Off we go to this place that I thought was a waste of time.. it can be. Less than two weeks ago I had 3 (maybe 5 people) I followed and I had weighed in on election day about the choice I'd made live in the stream (very cool) and really never gave Twitter much thought. Our site (cumulusmedical.com) was up and  there was no great migration (ya know?) and I started to wonder, "what do ya do?". Nice site Geoff built. Took Months.. it's nice... we had hired a marketing consulting firm (check's in the mail) who told us that we should get going and build a following on Twitter and Facebook...the prospect of generating much activity on FB was slim..but on Twitter?...that might be another story.. first came the get rich quick scams... bought one... learned to use SocialOomph and Bit.ly. Opened a Clickbank account and became a spammer... got quickly embarrassed by a lovely follower who wrote this: "send me one 'increase your followers by 10,000 tomorrow' message in any form and you're blocked"... I love that girl today I do. the culture corrects itself it seems if you pay attention. It is a friendly ,supportive place. I quickly followed 2000 (by hand)  power users to see what they were doing.. some returned the follow (I found them at: Twitter.grader.com and wefollow). I loaded twitterberry onto the Bold and have Uber and Tiny Twitter on the Blackberry as well... have facebook for BB there but it's a more limited environment so far... friends you know....so I went from 0 to 1200+ followers in a week and a half as a nobody and using SocialOomph to post about the things that meant (still do actually) something to me...I'm in the stream.  Ultimately I settled on using Tweetadder to control my searching for following and add those who share our commitment to a mindful existence. Those who care about Health Care reform. the Oceans. Wildlife. Vegetarianism. Meditation. Peace. Love.  Yoga. Our Children. Truth and Justice... I hope you'll join me.. it's a good place to be...@pgoss.

Our Friends at Omoasis-Karma Yoga in Monterey

This is Sarah and Brenton. they were Yates and Sanders.. now Sanders. Sarah is a Yoga Babe (right?) and her column starts today on Cumulusmedical.com. She has a beautiful new studio in Monterey, CA. OmOasis. They have a sweet site.

WE went live last night! cumulusmedical.com is up!

So we are up.. and running... empower the patient is what we are all about.. come join the discussion!

CumulusMedical.com

..Noble beginnings. We wanted to be a resource. A premier resource for our neighbors. For our brothers and sisters in the wired community. Mostly mental health and spiritual problems from the treehouse porch but that's an opportunity for the songwriters. For the smart guys to figure out.

How could we be relevant in a space where there are ... umm..how many eHealth sites? I mean really... what's the problem? Can we make a business out of the noble proposition.

Early on it was apparent that it was hard to get important information to the doctor about us. The Patient. Suppose you had an emergency... Doctors flying blind. Electronic information was the answer and we had a vision... do a retinal scan and all your pertinent/vital info was there on a handheld for the people that would save your life perhaps... BUT. There are disclosure issues. Manipulation of data repository issues and on and on...Laws and Regs and Security. This all seems like another Insurance Company Conspiracy (in CAPS). We will figure out how to make the vision work...someday.

So we talked with patients and Doctors... Real Patients with potentially serious conditions. We continue to talk with them. We continue to monitor them on the net. Like the guy who was told that he had 3 months to live. "Go home and get your affairs in order". That was over 10 years ago. Or the young Lady who was told, "get prepared to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair".

Lots of research... Months of it and we are almost ready to go live and here's what we know: a little anxiety in a nervous world is going to be reduced by a site that is geared to the newly diagnosed, the care giver, the traveler and other who are worried that "something is wrong"... there will be a community . A social network. eMR and pHR capabilities and some eHub (buy the stuff you need conveniently here) functionality. All supported by the "need". Not exactly what the initial idead was, but an idea that will help people based on what they look for on the Net and what we have been told would be a "really big help".

BTW, while we were putting this together, I had my own scare. Perhaps in sympathy... who knows. I get it. Up close and very personal.. a little medication and a super doctor. The online community was hard to use. We will solve that.

Welcome to CumulusMedical.com

Nice New Logo

Our new business: Wellbeing. Focused on interactive Blogging.

CumulusMedical, Inc., is a Patient Health Record information portal allowing worldwide access to medical and healthcare related information, web-based subscriber healthcare management tools and, superior customer services. CumulusMedical, Inc. offers subscribers a secure web-based platform for personal and family health related data, online educational materials, interactive tools for physician/provider communications in addition to a robust social networking platform enabling exchange, debate and, empowering users to make better health and wellness decisions...

latest set-up and new firmware

so here's the new app set-up with some ideas... Gmail is good for composing because you can do it in landscape...the standard apps should all be able to operate that way. att needs to rollout a faster network and the wi-fi in this device needs to be speeded up as well .. the new firmware update seems to improve battery life at the expense of wi-fi availability.. MobileMe continues to be a disaster... error messages when I boot the main computer here telling me that the sync has stopped working and so forth...checking for a solution and closing the program.. email delivery continues to be slower (by far) that the Bberrys I used for years.. all that said, I really like the phone...the speakerphone could be louder and this and that... but the apps and functionality is great.. if I were responding to 100's of emails a day like the old days this would be nothing but a novelty... I remain surprised apple let this get out the door with so many bugs... landscape viewing needs to be added to ALL apps....especially email....did I already make that point???

Google/Remote on iPhone

this darn phone is just super... if i were doing 100's of email's a day I likely would get tired of the cramped touch-pad (coming from years of using a Blackberry)(u can do email via Gmail and on the web can use the landscape view to expand the keyboard), but here's the best thing I've found...apple makes an app called "remote" that let's you control your iTunes over your airport extreme/express network.... we have four systems in the house we live in now and I can control the music experience and apple TV from the phone with no real set-up and very little intelligence.... very cool.

The screenshot on the top is the remote view..just like iPod and below is Reader from the Google mobile app... nice ball game below... if you like slugfests!... Go Sox!

iPhone is here...some nice apps and shots...

...you hold down the home and power key briefly to take screen shots....

down the coast from cypress point..

...think i took this last winter...piccasa found it on a drive and I fooled with it a little (of course)...

... this is radio nowhere

... tryin' to make a connection with you....nice band Bruce...still kickin' it. Great to see.

link to videos on the Tube...

red sox nation in california

Man what a playoff season and series... funny when you grow up in ny and love all the ny and boston teams... easy to be a fan from CT where we moved when I was was young, but here in cali it's a little different... people never said anything about the red sox hats I wore when I played golf... until last week.. social issues aside... the sox are a team with a great manager.. ok owners and josh beckett... it's all in the stare to home for the sign from the general... as a team they explode and are patient at the plate... that doesn't happen by accident...a rookie 2nd basemen. bob marley would be proud of mannie... it was impressive... now let's see if this braintrust can figure out how to keep their mvp 3rd baseman and CS... btw--julio? sorry... you really turned me into a believer. super play. you never get there alone and these guys really proved it... Super Stuff!!!!! Ortiz not too bad either, but the real tip of the hat has to go to the manger TF and his right and left hand guys... the hard work and discipline paid off.. they made a very good baseball team look inadequate.

Victorinox-Swiss Army Tools, Watches, Cutlery and Apparel

seeing this for a week....

this picture was taken at point lobos south of carmel, ca on one of those sparkling January days we get.. been working it long enough, but there is sure to be more of it... spring is near..

a view south....on the way to Big Sur

"slightly" manipulated...one of my favorite views..just past rocky point.