Tag: school lunches

What IS the Matter with Kansas?

So Kansas wants to make it perfectly legal for a doctor to lie to a dumb bitch pregnant woman. Let me provide my own commentary on the ACLU’s points:

It would provide legal protection to a doctor who discovers that a baby will be born with a devastating condition and deliberately withholds that information from his patient because he doesn’t want her to seek an abortion. That means a doctor could decide to lie about the results of a woman’s prenatal test so that she won’t have information that she needs to make the best decision for her circumstances.

In other words, a doctor can make a woman give birth to a baby with birth defects that she can’t provide for financially or emotionally. Sorry, the days of “put the abomination in an institution” are long over. I’ve already discussed that this is fraud.

The bill attempts to scare women by forcing doctors to tell patients about a supposed link between abortion and breast cancer — a risk that the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and other medical experts roundly reject .

Doctors are not only allowed to lie to patients, they are forced to lie to patients.

This bill would also require public hospitals to turn away a woman who desperately needs an abortion to prevent serious harm to her health. The extremists pushing this bill would have a hospital tell a very sick woman that she should come back when her pregnancy is about to kill her, even if that risks her future fertility or causes organ failure.

I’m not sure what the definition of “public hospital”  is here: hospitals owned by government entities (rather than corporations or charitable organizations) or just hospitals open to the public. Nevertheless, this is like telling someone with chest pains to come back when they are sure it’s a heart attack.

Now here’s the thing. Where are the doctors on this? Why aren’t doctors screaming that this law puts women in danger? Why aren’t doctors pointing out that this bill requires them to lie to patients? Why am I the one pointing out that even with this fig leaf of a bill it’s going to bite doctors on the ass to tell a patient that everything is fine when it isn’t?

AMA? AOA? ACOG? This is the second state that wants to say it’s acceptable to conceal important medical information. I don’t even know how many states require doctors to lie about breast cancer. At least one state requires expensive, medically unnecessary procedures before an abortion, and more states are considering it. Where’s your statement on this? How does this square with your legal and ethical requirements to do the right thing for patients?

How long before employers decide they just can’t do business in a state where their female employees face obstacles to sometimes (regrettably) medically necessary care, and where a routine pregnancy can mean losing employees who must become full time caregivers for a baby with severe birth defects?

In Closing: Ninja; that resume can go in the trash; on J.P. Morgan; how did we get to a lunch revolution?; and NAFTA vs. China.

Self-Serving Bunch of Asshats

Today, Bank of Asshat America said “Investors should be buying bonds in all categories of U.S. securitized debt, in part because the market will continue to shrink next year.”

Securitized debt. That’s bonds backed by things like real estate loans and leases.

Now let’s see, Bank Of Asshat, where might you come up with those? Perhaps from Countrywide??

How convenient that your analyst thinks we should buy the thing that you just happen to be selling. Very convenient.

In Closing: How enterprise crashed the economy; katsudon; too frustrated about the DINOcrats folding on tax cuts for people who don’t need them to say anything rational; Steven King will rip the throat out of your Twilight whiny sparkly vampires; bank failures; full one way, empty the other; you think Sarah Palin is bad?; jobless rate by level of education; young adult fiction; it never occurred to her that you might not be able to afford cereal and a banana (fine, b****, you adopt them all!); and this:
Rob Rogers

Stupid Republican Tricks

Seriously, there has been so much stupid that I don’t know where to start.

I could start close to home with Senate candidate Sue Lowden, who thinks we should be able to barter with our doctors and pay with, for example, chickens!

I could go down the road a bit to Arizona’s new racial profiling illegal immigration law, which “requires state and local police to determine the status of people if there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that they are illegal immigrants and to arrest people who are unable to provide documentation proving they are in the country legally.” By the way, “reasonable suspicion” means the cop doesn’t like you and/or you’re brown. I don’t think most people appreciate that most people don’t carry proof of citizenship in their pockets — NO a Driver’s License is NOT proof of citizenship! Never has been, shouldn’t ever be.

But wait, maybe that’s what Senator McCain was getting at when he said that illegal immigrants are deliberately causing car accidents! I certainly can’t think of any rational reason that anybody — particularly someone here illegally — would cause accidents. Insurance fraud?? What a dangerous way to make money!

It’s OK though, because Representative Bilbray says a cop can tell if somebody is illegal just by looking at their clothes! So tell me, what exactly is the difference between the shirt I buy at Target and the shirt that an illegal immigrant buys at Target? I don’t want to accidentally get the wrong one. And certainly you’d better not dress up for any ethnic festivals in Arizona without sticking your birth certificate or naturalization papers in your pocket!

Then again I could go to the horse’s mouth — Washington D.C. — and examine the party of NO!’s “Just scrap it and maybe start over” strategy on almost every initiative. Oh, and let’s not forget that it is at least partly thanks to the Republicans that the newly passed health insurance reform bill still allows rescission and still has no way to control wild increases in premiums.

Not that the Democrats are innocent, but certainly no wonder people are “fed up with political incivility.” Anybody who wants to be re-elected had better pay attention to public sentiment now.

In Closing: Freezing a 787 for science; look, putting twins in different homerooms to see which one learns to read better doesn’t prove that reading skills are 82% genetic, just that the teacher and classroom aren’t 100% to blame/praise for the results!; Homelessness, it’s not just for addicts and the mentally ill anymore (sadly, for some people, it’s what’s for dinner); a scathing truth about “successfully” parenting a crowd; high schools preparing kids for college without a thought of preparing them for work; if the Fed is going to print money, do you suppose they could send some my way?; congrats to GM on paying back the TARP money to the Feds; green Navy vessels on the ocean blue; the various watch lists and no-fly lists aren’t just an annoyance, they divert attention from real threats; on long term unemployment; oh waah, companies are having a hard time raising prices; let’s see how far the rotten banking practices extend; and school lunches have officially become a matter of national security.

Flint and Steel

What happens when you strike flint and steel? Fire.

In this case, lots and lots of fire.

Back on March 25, the City of Flint, Michigan made the decision to lay off 23 of 88 firefighters and 46 of 150 police officers. Almost immediately, the fires started. Several fires, every night. Sometimes, 8 or 9 fires. Mostly, they were among the 3000 vacant structures in need of demolition. Two were apartment buildings. A couple have been occupied homes. All have been called “suspicious.” In fact, the Mayor calls them a series of “coordinated criminal attacks.”

The remaining firefighters are understandably exhausted, and this makes them prone to making mistakes that can maim or kill themselves or their co-workers. Citizens are not happy at all, because there is always the fear that their homes could be next — either as a primary fire or as fire spreads from the vacant houses that dot their neighborhoods. One interesting detail is that only 6 of the structures are specifically known to be bank-owned.

Not surprisingly, many are blaming the Mayor, who had to do whatever it took to close an estimated $8,000,000 to $10,000,000 budget shortfall. A recall effort is underway to get him out of office, but that won’t change the fact that the city needs millions more dollars than it has. The Mayor has proposed a $13,000,000 bond sale to both cover the shortfall and help the city get its financial house in order. Some say that just won’t be enough to do the job, but the Mayor’s budget for the next fiscal year projects a surplus.

The surprising thing — shocking in fact — is how little attention the mainstream media is paying to this. When Colorado Springs turned off the streetlights to save money, CNN and all the rest were there to make sure we all knew about it. But when a city in Michigan starts slowly burning to the ground, block by block, because they can’t afford enough firefighters? Only a bit of coverage from the local paper, a couple of firefighter groups, and the local ABC affiliate. It isn’t even a story in the newspapers down in Detroit, a mere 66 miles away.

Shameful.

Cross-Posted at The Moderate Voice

In Closing: unemployed workers per job opening (and remember, that’s the narrow, Department of Labor definition of unemployed); hell has a special place for people whose job is to find reasons not to pay unemployment benefits; relationship red flags (if I had limitless time and energy I’d add to this list); Should the Vatican have adopted the sorts of reforms already in place in the United States? Does the CSM really need to ask this question?; on school lunches; on “too big to fail” (um, yeah); So you call the cops to report a crime, do you really want his first question to be whether you can prove you’re a citizen?; if only there weren’t some truth in this letter from the Baby Boomers to their children; and one doctor tells us how she thinks Health Insurance Reform may cost everyone more money.