John Nichols reports in The Nation that Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., keeps "provoking congressional Republicans and their media allies with fact-based challenges to the lies being used to block health-care reform."

Mr. Grayson gained notoriety after he claimed the Republican plan for uninsured Americans is "don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly." Now he's created a "Names of the Dead" Web site to memorialize Americans who died because they didn't have health insurance. His greeting begins:

"Every year, more than 44,000 Americans die simply because they have no health insurance. I have created this project in their memory. I hope that honoring them will help us end this senseless loss of American lives."

Danielle Ivory of The Huffington Post Investigative Fund found that women who have been raped sometimes can't get health insurance because they contracted a sexually transmitted disease or took drugs to prevent STDs or were treated for psychological aftereffects. Among the cases she examines is that of Christina Turner, who "feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month's worth of anti-AIDS medicine. Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable."

Health care is a particularly difficult issue in Braddock, where UPMC plans to shut down the only hospital in town. Chris Briem at Null Space laments the closing: "For a place that has already suffered immeasurably, this latest bit of news may be the worst."

Mr. Briem might be gloomier than most since he hasn't bought into what he calls "the mythos" of Braddock's alleged revival. Last year he analyzed Braddock stats and found little good happening there, citing, for instance, "continued rapid real estate depreciation."

As he puts it now: "The point was that the popular vision of Braddock rebounding is not really matched by the facts on the ground. If anything things are worse than they were even last year which was worse than most any time in the past. In few cases is the popular perception so incongruous with what we can measure."

Nicole Gelinas at RealClearMarkets.com notes that "earlier this month, a congressional oversight panel released its first analysis of the Obama administration's $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program, an effort to keep 4 million families from losing their homes. The analysis shows that the Treasury, in trying to keep people in homes they can't afford, is relying on the same perverse principle that inflated the housing bubble in the first place: namely, that it's fine to borrow recklessly to buy a house because house prices can only go up and up. Trying to maintain a bubble mentality, rather than help people adjust to life after the bubble has burst, will hobble economic recovery."

Carbolic Smoke Ball gets this scoop as the movie "Amelia" opens in theaters:

"FORT COLLINS -- Amelia Earhart, famed aviatrix who was thought to have perished while attempting a dangerous flight across the Pacific in 1937, emerged from a cardboard box in the attic of a garage here yesterday.

"Ms. Earhart pronounced herself 'pleased as punch' that the elaborate ruse she undertook to fake her own death created such worldwide attention. 'This is going to make it much easier for me to get my own reality television show,' said Ms. Earhart, who steadied herself with a cane."

Liliana Segura at AlterNet wonders whether a new iPhone app that tracks registered sex offenders is "keeping you safe or profiting off paranoia." After wandering through various problems with the POM Offender Locater, she concludes that the company is exploiting parents' fears, citing incendiary promotional lines such as:

"By not knowing where registered sex offenders live, it is like playing 'Russian Roulette' with the safety of your loved ones. These individuals know who you are, and worse, know who your kids are!"

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.