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columbus represent

Monday, May 22, 2006

So Frightening

I don't understand why other people feel that they have the legal right to force you to do or not do as they please, BASED ON THEIR religious views. I'm just disgusted by all of this. See below for an exerpt from an article on TomPaine.com and then read the whole frightening thing.

The War on Sex
By Christina Page
The architects of the South Dakota ban on abortion have a bold plan for our country. Certainly, they have already given a jolt to the majority of Americans, or at least the 66 percent who want Roe v. Wade to remain law of the land. But there’s a great deal more the American public should know about these legislative campaigners. Especially since there’s a lot more of their agenda they hope to realize.
They have a plan for you and if you are anything like the 85 percent of American couples who have sex once a week, you’re not going to like it.
Today, pro-life groups in the United States are reclassifying the most common contraception methods, including the birth control pill, the patch, the IUD, and the Depo-Provera shot, as “abortifacients” by claiming, with no scientific backing, that they cause abortions.

The American Life League explained, “We have been working to prove that prescription contraceptives have nothing to do with woman’s health and well-being but are recreational drugs that prevent fertilization and abort children.”

While the more extreme side of the pro-life movement hasn’t yet advocated violence against those that distribute birth control, they do agree with the concept of "contraception=abortion." Most chillingly, Army of God, a pro-life organization that honors those who murder abortion providers as “heroes,” also classifies birth control as an abortion method. On the “Birth Control is Evil” section of their website, they explain, quite threateningly, “Birth control is evil and a sin. Birth control is anti-baby and anti-child…Why would you stop your own child from being conceived or born? What kind of human being are you?”

Cloaked in the heated rhetoric of the abortion debate, an entirely new pro-life agenda is taking shape. Most Americans don’t know about this yet. But the Right to Life movement, which is now rewriting the country’s laws on abortion—of which South Dakota is clearly just a first target—has a broader and, for most of us, a disturbing plan. If this powerful movement succeeds, Americans will require safe abortion services more than ever.

A Taste of Heaven



AAHHHHHH..... Doesn't this just look amazing? This picture is from a sad story printed in the New York Times about how cured meats don't meet the requirements for food safety set forth by the USDA. Let's go to Europe and eat some meats!

Dry-Cured Sausages: Kissed by Air, Never by Fire

The smell of rot — the ripe funk you breathe in Italian pork stores and French charcuteries — has always been part of the craft of curing. Traditional dry-cured sausages — the rough-textured, chewy ones like Italian soppressata and French saucisson sec — aren't cooked. Instead, the raw meat is stuffed into natural casings and left exposed to the air, picking up wild yeasts and cultures that start fermentation. Then, like wine and cheese, the sausages are aged in a cool, humid place to develop the rounded, savory taste that comes from slow ripening. White mold grows on the outside; water drips out as the sausage dries.

On Monday inspectors destroyed all the cured meats at Il Buco restaurant in NoHo. They did so, according to the owner, Donna Lennard, not because of any evidence of contamination but because the temperature in the curing room was six degrees higher than it should have been.

'These are pigs that were raised for us,' Ms. Lennard said. 'We knew their names. We were trying to do something sustainable and traditional, and this is what happens.'

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Since We Have Such A Short Memory

This is a great reminder to those of us who don't know our history in this country, and who somehow think that we of European decent are the indigenous people of this land, that this is OUR country, not these damn brown people who are going to ruin our culture and history. From the Washington Post

U.S. Immigration Debate Is a Road Well Traveled
Early-20th-Century Concerns Resurface

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 8, 2006; A01

NEW YORK -- They were portrayed as a disreputable lot, the immigrant hordes of this great city.

The Germans refused for decades to give up their native tongue and raucous beer gardens. The Irish of Hell's Kitchen brawled and clung to political sinecures. The Jews crowded into the Lower East Side, speaking Yiddish, fomenting socialism and resisting forced assimilation. And by their sheer numbers, the immigrants depressed wages in the city.

As for the multitudes of Italians, who settled Mulberry Street, East Harlem and Canarsie? In 1970, seven decades after their arrival, Italians lagged behind every immigrant group in educational achievement.

The bitter arguments of the past echo loudly these days as Congress debates toughening the nation's immigration laws and immigrants from Latin America and Asia swell the streets of U.S. cities in protest. Most of the concerns voiced today -- that too many immigrants seek economic advantage and fail to understand democracy, that they refuse to learn English, overcrowd homes and overwhelm public services -- were heard a century ago. And there was a nub of truth to some complaints, not least that the vast influx of immigrants drove down working-class wages.

Yet historians and demographers are clear about the bottom line: In the long run, New York City -- and the United States -- owes much of its economic resilience to replenishing waves of immigrants. The descendants of those Italians, Jews, Irish and Germans have assimilated. Manhattan's Little Italy is vestigial, no more than a shrinking collection of restaurants.

Now another wave washes over. Fully 38 percent of New York's 8 million residents are foreign-born, nearly the same percentage as a century ago.

"It would be easy to say the short-run costs of immigration outweighed the benefits," said Joe Salvo, a director at New York's City Planning Department. "But the benefits are longer term. We wouldn't be the superpower we are if we hadn't let them in."

Advocates of stricter enforcement argue that those who came a century ago were different because they arrived legally. Movies and novels depict customs agents at New York's Ellis Island -- that keyhole through which 16 million immigrants passed from 1882 to 1922 -- examining immigrants and their papers with a capricious eye toward shipping back laggards.

Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, wrote about her Irish forebears in a Wall Street Journal column: "They waited in line. They passed the tests. They had to get permission to come. . . . They had to get through Ellis Island . . . get questioned and eyeballed by a bureaucrat with a badge."

But these accounts are flawed, historians say. Until 1918, the United States did not require passports; the term "illegal immigrant" had no meaning. New arrivals were required only to prove their identity and find a relative or friend who could vouch for them.

Customs agents kept an eye out for lunatics and the infirm (and after 1905, for anarchists). Ninety-eight percent of the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were admitted to the United States, and 78 percent spent less than eight hours on the island. (The Mexico-United States border then was unguarded and freely crossed in either direction.) "Shipping companies did the health inspections in Europe because they didn't want to be stuck taking someone back," said Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College and author of "From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration." "Eventually they introduced a literacy test," she added, "but it was in the immigrant's own language, not English."

At the peak of that earlier wave, 75 percent of immigrants landed in New York. Some, like Germans fleeing failed revolutions, sought democracy. Others, like the Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, sought safety.

But perhaps half of the Italian immigrants returned to Italy, often with cash to buy a farm or own a business. Greeks, too, returned in large numbers. "People complain about Mexicans coming for economic reasons, but they don't realize how many earlier immigrants just sojourned here," said Richard Wright, a geography professor at Dartmouth College. "The rates of return are staggering."

When Congress enacted immigration quotas in the 1920s, it left the door ajar for Northern Europeans and Mexicans, whom even then American businesses sought as cheap labor. By contrast, in 1882 Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring the Chinese from U.S. shores. And when Congress contemplated a similar law for the Japanese, the government in Tokyo instead entered into an agreement with the United States to prohibit immigration and avoid international humiliation.

Still, European immigrants found plenty of backlash. Nativist sentiments ran strong, and white Protestant reformers championed English-language instruction and temperance, the latter reflecting the Establishment's disdain for hard-drinking immigrants. The Germans set up 121 breweries in Brooklyn and Manhattan alone.

Politicians cast a wary eye at Kleindeutschland, the 300,000-person Little Germany in Lower Manhattan (no trace of the enclave exists today), and called on Germans to stop being "hyphenated" Americans. As Italians and Poles and Jews and Slavs poured into New York City, native-born Americans complained about the "mongrelization" of the "white race."

Immigrants returned the favor, giving voice to the alienation of the new arrivals. "I never thought of myself as American" as a child, Norman Podhoretz wrote in his 1967 book, "Making It." "In Brooklyn there were no Americans; there were Jews and Negroes, Poles and Irishmen."

Debates arose that still resonate. Radicals worried that immigrants depressed working-class wages, and there is evidence that this was so. Labor organizing took off most successfully after Congress moved to shut off the immigration funnel in the 1920s. "Because people kept coming in, union organizing efforts doesn't really take off until the 1920s and '30s," said Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union College. The Establishment heaped scorn upon those who rallied for better wages. Immigrants, the New York Times editorialized in the late 19th century, should avoid "insane imitations of the miserable class warfare of Europe."

"There was a great fear in that the European revolutions might come to the United States," said James Green, author of "Death in the Haymarket," an account of immigrant sentiment and labor unrest in Chicago in the 1880s.

Other worries seem now like artifacts from a forgotten age. For all that Americans worried about the primacy of English at the turn of the 20th century, most first-generation immigrants quickly shed native languages -- in polyglot New York no single language could dominate. This remains true as the three largest immigrant groups -- Dominicans, Chinese and South Asians -- share no language but English. (The vast Spanish-speaking Mexican influx into Southern California is another matter and potentially more problematic as immigrants have less incentive to drop a shared language, say sociologists.)

By the 1950s, Germans, Irish and Jews had abandoned immigrant enclaves. Although barriers of prejudice remained -- Ivy League schools and white-shoe law firms in New York maintained stringent "Jewish" quotas well into the 1960s -- the sons and daughters of these immigrants moved quickly into white-collar professions.

Italians, Poles and Greeks took a much slower climb up the socioeconomic ladder. Like today's Mexican immigrants, these earlier immigrants often came from rural lands and stressed work over education; sociologist Foner notes it was unusual for a child of Italian immigrants to finish high school. When in the late 1960s the City University of New York allowed any high school graduate to enroll regardless of grades, Italians were the greatest beneficiary. Studies so far show a similar pattern for Mexicans: The second generation is doing better economically than the parents but not keeping pace with other ethnic immigrant groups.

"There was a lot of catching up for the Italians and Poles, and a lot of social costs which this imposed on the country," said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "I don't see any reasons the Mexicans can't catch up, too, but three or four generations is a long time."

In a pattern perhaps rooted in human nature, each generation of immigrants tended to look down on those who followed. Journalist Jacob A. Riis, a Danish immigrant, remarked upon this in his 1890 book "How the Other Half Lives." "The once unwelcome Irishman has been followed in his turn by the Italian, the Russian Jew, and the Chinaman," Riis wrote, "and has himself taken a hand at opposition, quite as bitter and quite as ineffectual, against these later hordes."

Lewis Fidler, portly and quick-witted, grew up in the 1960s in East Flatbush and Flatlands, working-class Brooklyn neighborhoods with a smattering of professionals. He recalls listening as Italian and Jewish neighbors -- the sons and daughters of immigrants -- sat on porches and worried about an influx of black immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados. These newcomers, the adults insisted, would run down the neighborhood.

Now Fidler is a city councilman in much the same district, and East Flatbush and Flatlands remain working-class neighborhoods with a smattering of professionals. Except that his constituents are West Indians -- the Italians and Jews have moved on.

The transition was in fact rough. Two decades ago, vacant stores, marijuana fronts and chop shops for stolen autos pockmarked the avenues. Now restaurants with bright blue awnings boast of the best jerk chicken, and a public park is being renovated to add cricket fields.

"The old-timers can't get over the fact that the bagel shop is now a roti shop," Fidler said. "But we've got lots of young families, and all they want to talk about are the schools."

Fidler, who is Jewish, is fine with that. "I run up bigger majorities in the West Indian precincts because the immigrants just want guys who deliver."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

I Told You So (Medical Malpractice Crisis My Ass Part II)

As anyone who follows healthcare policy in this country knows, the right wing's solution to solving the crisis of astronomically increasing health care costs comes in the form of tort reform. How many times have you heard the talking point about how "frivolous lawsuits" are driving doctors out of business, and are causing health care costs to spiral out of control? I wrote about my frustrations with these falsehoods, and the negative consequences that low income people in this state now face because of it, in an earlier post.

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Senate smartly blocked 2 bills (S 22 & S 23) that would have put a cap on non-economic damages in malpractice suits where the health care provider acted "with malicious intent to injure the claimant" or "deliberately failed to avoid unnecessary injury" (Crowley/Schuler, CQ Today, 5/8). "President" Bush's reaction?

"I am disappointed that the Senate has yet again failed to pass real medical liability reform legislation. Junk lawsuits are driving too many good doctors out of business."
The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist's reaction:
"Health care dollars should be spent on patients and not on lawyers who are abusing the system" (New York Times, 5/9).
What about health care dollars being spent on the patient, not insurance company's profits!? That's the real crisis.

Now I don't purport to have all the answers. I don't have a silver bullet to save us from our health care financing woes. However I DO know that the medical malpractice "crisis" that we hear about is nothing but a red herring.

Data recently published in Health Affairs backs me up on this one. In a piece entitled: Malpractice Premiums And Physicians’ Income: Perceptions Of A Crisis Conflict With Empirical Evidence The name kind of says it all: perceptions of a crisis.

The study uses data collected by the American Medical Association between 1970 and today. One of the authors of the study states that the American Medical Association "ignores its data when proclaiming a malpractice crisis," The study basically says that, adjusting for inflation, physician's are currently spending less on malpractice insurance than they were in 1986. That's less folks, not more, not so much more that it can be called a crisis. So why are physicians and lawmakers trying so hard to create legislation about this? Once again the author of the study provides some insight in a piece he wrote for the Louisville Courier-Journal entitled Legislative Malpractice?:
Physicians feel beleaguered by reduced fees, market competition and health insurers who second guess their work. Malpractice has become a symbol to them of everything wrong with medicine -- a convenient scapegoat. Thus, senators find an opportunity to please vocal constituents without committing government funds or their personal effort to address real problems. However, caps won't end the frustrations of medical practice, boost physician income much or increase access to health care.
And what about Mr. Bush's statement about this "crisis" driving physician's out of business? The author sheds some light on that:
AMA surveys show that the supply of physicians increased four times faster than the population from 1965 to 2000. The increase in physicians also outpaced population growth since 1995, even for physicians in high-risk specialties such as Ob/Gyn, and even in states that the AMA says have a crisis because they don't cap damage awards.
Do I think that this data will change the call to put these money grubbing trial lawyers out of business? Of course not. This is not an administration that puts much (if any) emphasis on truth. They will continue to use scare tactics to lie to the public, and I'm afraid, the public will continue to believe it.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

A Day Without Immigrants


From a newspaper in Bulgaria

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

So Sad... We Can Do Better

In one of the wealthiest, most powerful nations in the world, 50 people die every day from a lack of health insurance. The sobering statistics below, for those most vulnerable, those we should make SURE that we take care of, newborn babies, should make us hang our heads in shame. We care more about killing kids in other nations (as witnessed by our defense budget), than we do about making sure our own are born healthy.

Racial disparities impact infant mortality
Tuesday, May 9, 2006

CHICAGO (AP) — America may be the world’s superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia.

Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report. Latvia’s rate is 6 per 1,000.

The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities. Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Consumers Union Rocks



They have launched a new database on natural medicines: vitamins, herbs, supplements etc. http://www.consumerreports.org/mg/home.htm

"Get Me Out Alive"

This article in the Washington Post brought back a flood of memories of the frustration, fear, anger, and powerlessnes of being a patient in a hospital. Anyone going into the health care field who hasn't been a patient should read it.

Get Me Out Alive
As a Nurse, She Knew the System. Then She Became a Patient

By Rosalind Feldman
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, May 2, 2006; Page HE01

I used to pride myself on my knowledge of the health care system, gleaned from many years of experience as a nurse. When I needed to make personal health decisions, I reviewed medical research and called friends who worked in nursing and medicine. Then I acted with confidence.

That was before my accident last spring.

My initial aims were simple: to fix my femur and end the stabbing pain I felt whenever I tried to move my leg. Two days into my 10-day hospital stay -- five in acute care, five in rehab -- I revised my goals. I emerged from surgery wanting something more basic: to survive the microbes and risks of deep vein thrombosis, the ineptitude of some staff and the malice of others.

I awoke from surgery, strapped to a wedge between my legs. I vowed not to moan. From years of observation, I know that it is essential to maintain control to avoid upsetting others, especially -- and this may surprise you -- health care workers. But advocating for myself proved difficult.

 
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