Freshman Congressman Alan Grayson, of Florida, is sick of the game-playing in Congress, and boy is it refreshing.

He's sick of hearing about how the insurance industry -- rolling in more cash than many countries -- will suffer if our lawmakers do the moral thing and revamp how health insurance is sold and doled out in our country. He's sick of the Republicans wasting time and cowing down to their insurance industry financial supporters.

He's sick of sick people getting sicker because they can't afford to go to the doctor. More, he's tired of people dropping dead because they can't afford adequate health care. In case you haven't heard, more than 44,000 people die EVERY YEAR because of the decisions made by insurance company death panels.

Grayson believes, in the very least, we should honor the dead by naming them. So, he's started a new Web site: NamesoftheDead.com. There you can enter the name of your friends and relatives who died because they didn't have enough insurance, or because they didn't have any at all.

He's also got a petition you can sign letting Congressman Harry Reid know to get crackin' on health care reform.

What are you waiting for? Click the links. Speak up.

Florida Congressman Alan Grayson keeps provoking congressional Republicans and their media allies with fact-based challenges to the lies being used to block health care reform.

No matter how desperately Republicans in Congress and their amen corner in the media may try to censor the dissident Democrats, Grayson is reminding America about the trail of dead left by insurance-company greed and political neglect.

The Florida Democrat who drew national attention last month when he declared on the House floor that the Republican plan for uninsured Americans was "don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly," was back on the House floor this week to announce the creation of a website to honor the victims of the current system.

Grayson, who has taken the lead in highlighting a Harvard study that shows 44,000 Americans die annually because they have no health insurance, told the House and the nation: "I think it dishonors all those Americans who have lost their lives because they had no health coverage, by ignoring them, by not paying attention to them, and by doing nothing to change the situation that led them to lose their live."

With that in mind, he announced the launch of a Names of the Dead website.

Watch Grayson in action:

"The Republican's health care plan was a blank piece of paper."

An interview with Maddow, after a reminder of some of the mean-spirited stuff Republicans have said about health care reform:

The scientists involved in this study are equating junk food addiction to heroine addiction. I believe it.

Junk food elicits addictive behavior in rats similar to the behaviors of rats addicted to heroin, a new study finds. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food. The results, presented October 20 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, may help explain the changes in the brain that lead people to overeat.

“This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

To see how junk food affects the brain’s natural reward system — the network of nerve cells that release feel-good chemicals — Johnson started at the grocery store. He loaded up on typical Western fare, including Ho Hos, sausage, pound cake, bacon and cheesecake. Johnson fed rats either a standard diet of high-nutrient, low-calorie chow, or unlimited amounts of the palatable junk food. Rats that ate the junk food soon developed compulsive eating habits and became obese.

After just five days on the junk food diet, rats showed “profound reductions” in the sensitivity of their brains’ pleasure centers, suggesting that the animals quickly became habituated to the food. As a result, the rats ate more food to get the same amount of pleasure. Just as heroin addicts require more and more of the drug to feel good, rats needed more and more of the junk food. “They lose control,” Kenny says. “This is the hallmark of addiction.”

To see how strong the drive to eat junk food was, the researchers exposed the rats to a foot shock when they ate the high-fat food. Rats that had not been constantly exposed to the junk food quickly stopped eating. But the foot shock didn’t faze rats accustomed to the junk food — they continued to eat, even though they knew the shock was coming.

These reward pathway deficits persisted for weeks after the rats stopped eating the junk food, the researchers found. “It’s almost as if you break these things, it’s very, very hard to go back to the way things were before,” Kenny says. When the junk food was taken away and the rats had access only to nutritious chow (what Kenny calls the “salad option”), the obese rats refused to eat.

Read the entire Science News article here.

Apparently this isn't a new problem. The Jackson Five and McKenzie Phillips weigh in:

You will never find me encouraging anyone to watch Faux News. Instead, I'd like to recommend a documentary entitled "Outfoxed," which shines a light on what goes on behind Faux News' cameras.

All the same, this is America: If the nuts on Faux News want to fake-cry, lie, twist the facts, make shit up -- that's their right. If even more nuts want to watch that crap, pretend like it's actual news and never seek the facts, that's their right.

Never forget, in America, you're allowed to be as uninformed as you want to be; there are no non-nonsense limits.

So, White House officials, do us a big favor and stop telling us what to watch on TV. You're ticking off the people who like you and there's a pretty good chance all you're going to accomplish in your war on Faux is to encourage people who already hate you to hate you even more.

Focus POTUS. Focus on something else like, I dunno, the public option, climate change, unemployment, the two wars you need to get us out of, and on and on and on.

Pick different battles. Drop this one.

“They’re not really a news station,” David Axelrod explained to George Stephanopoulos last Sunday. “It’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming if you watch, it’s really not news… The bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way.”

The official White House position is that the rest of the media should join Team Obama in ostracizing a news outlet that the White House doesn’t like. This raises several obvious questions:

Since when does the federal government get to make programming decisions, much less decide what is and what is not a legitimate news organization?

Where did political consultants—people who spend their lives lying to reporters—get the moral standing to make pronouncements about journalistic ethics?

When did liberals agree it was OK to use government power to muzzle opinions they don’t agree with?

And, most of all, when did the press decide to go along with all of this?

Read the rest of this "Big Fat Story" from The Daily Beast here.

Further reading: The Conservative Media Bias

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn: "Fox News is the research arm of the Republican Party."

Here's a trailer for "Outfoxed," released in 2004. Oh, one more thing: Flipflop.