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[Prudence]

Oh yeah... I forgot to mention I dont like the way he passed the bill to begin with.. it was underhanded without congressional approval, thats why it ended up on the surpreme court floor to begin with. That is not how this country is run. You dont go into a debat room in the middle of the night and come out with new laws while the lawmakers slept. I dont see this as a conservative or democrat issue.. its a process issue. And thats scarry to me.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Prudence

I dont like the supreme courts decission.. I think it has found a loop hole in what apears to me a movement almost toward dictatorship. Im sure the taxation point was argured quite well on the floor of the supreme court and it won out. Ok .. so we can be taxed.. got it.. how about if at the end of the year.. the medical community has to turn over its billing to the federal govenment(see where this is still going) so that each who files income tax is matched up to that list to see if they have any outstanding medical bills .. if they do then tax them....Either way the federal govenment is "dictating" something as individual as your privite health care issues.. be it from the consumer or the provider.. They want that informantion. If this is truly upheld.. you will find that there will be limits then placed on procedures and recovery times for indivuals, services will be cut, it will eventually be that you will have to go through a governmental process to see if your condition is even worth addressing by the health care community. They will be dictating what meds can be dispensed .. at what cost and rate.. because they can only tax a certian precentage Heath care is not a one size fits all. I do understand that privite insurance will still exsit.. until it doesnt. The most basic of human instint is survival..What would you do for a person who is standing over you holding the very pill that would enable you to take your next breath. Its a wolf in sheeps clothing yall.

Originally Posted by Prudence

Oh yeah... I forgot to mention I dont like the way he passed the bill to begin with.. it was underhanded without congressional approval, thats why it ended up on the surpreme court floor to begin with. That is not how this country is run. You dont go into a debat room in the middle of the night and come out with new laws while the lawmakers slept. I dont see this as a conservative or democrat issue.. its a process issue. And thats scarry to me.

I can understand your concerns. The act is not without its flaws. And, it is somewhat different from what we are used to. Change can be scary and worrisome. Plus, anything that is government propelled makes me twitch.

There is both good stuff and bad stuff in this act, tho I am thinking the good is outweighing the bad....at the moment.

What I like about this act is that it levels the playing field, somewhat, for everyday people who do not have access to insurance or the care it provides. This affects an estimated 250 million people in this country. Most of those people are the "working poor", minorities, women, children, immigrants, the unemployed etc.

It also eliminates caps on lifetime dollar limits which is good for people with catastropic illnesses including premies. Doesnt take much for medical bills to send you into bankruptcy.

It also stops insurances from denying coverage to those with pre-existing illness or for jacking up the price of their policy to some exorbitent amount. Insurers have tried to be more and more creative in defining pre-exisitng to absolve themselves from the costs including stupid shit like denying coverage for newborns who have congenital or genetic problems, trying to deny coverage for genetic cancers in adults etc. That's kind of sick in my book.

It extends coverage for young adults under their parents policies, for early retirees in limbo between private coverage and medicare, for those who want to change jobs but have been reluctant to do so because of the loss of insurance etc.

It requires free preventative coverage for the general population plus specific stuff for women and children. See full list here: http://www.healthcare.gov/news/facts...ices-list.html

It will do some good stuff. Like everything else in life, good stuff has trade offs of not so great stuff.

I was not fond of mandated health care when Romney enacted it here in this state. I was not fond of the cost of the program to taxpayers and the new taxes it generated. I was not happy when businesses started dropping their health insurance because it was way cheaper to pay the fines than it was to provide the coverage.

Being one of those privileged little fuckers, I was not fond of any of it....until I needed it. My $700 a month COBRA was running out. I needed insurance. I jumped thru all the hoops and got my insurance, pretty close to the same coverage tho with limited providers for under $50 a month.

With the economic meltdown, the loss of jobs and the insurance they provide, million of people in this state were unable to afford the COBRA payments on their family plans - over $1000 a month. But, they could get affordable and relatively equal care for considerably less.

Without mandated health care and the options it provides here in Massachusetts, I and a shitload of other people would have been up the creek without a paddle.

I am also old enough and worked in health care when Nixon introduced HMO's and PPO's as a cost effective alternative to major medical policies back in 1973. The reaction of the general public and of many people in congress was much like we hear now i.e. death committees, people dying in the streets because they would be denied care or medication, limited care, limited access, a path to socialized medicine, etc. There were glitches of course but none of the doomsday projections ever materialized, and we managed not to convert to socialized medicine in the process either. Having successfully negotiated this path before, I am hopeful we can do it again.

The biggest deterrent we have to things going too wonky is the sheer power and economics of the health care industry itself. They are not going to give up their obscene profits without a damn good and very public fight.

The way this bill was passed didnt surprise me too much. Two sides unable to come to an agreement leading one to force the issue. Seems like typical politics to me. The republicans holding congressional hearings on contraceptives and only inviting male and male religious leaders to testify about the appropriate use of my vagina and uterus was much more disturbing to me.

I hear your concerns tho. Have a few of my own. I am hoping we, as a country, still have some of the ideals of a republic our forefathers set forth to guide our actions in stuff like this.

[Kobi]

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 30, 2012
BOSTON — A new law anti-discrimination law protecting transgender individuals in Massachusetts is coming into force.

The Transgender Equal Rights Bill will take effect Sunday — just over seven months after Gov. Deval Patrick signed it into law.

Gender identity will also be added to the protected categories under the state's hate crimes law.

Attorney General Martha Coakley called the law a “much needed update,” saying it will help ensure that transgender individuals feel secure at home, work and in their communities.

[Kobi]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Four New York seventh graders whose bullying of a bus monitor grandmother went viral on YouTube have been suspended from school for a year, a school district official said on Friday.

The students will be sent to a non-school facility where they will be tutored academically.

They will be required to complete 50 hours of community service with senior citizens and will receive formal behavioral training, according to a statement from the head of the Greece Central School District in upstate New York.

The four students involved, whose last names have not been released, do not face criminal charges. Their families have agreed to allow the school district to publicly announce the results of an internal investigation.

"Each of the students involved admitted wrongdoing, accepted the recommended consequences and agreed to permit the district to publicly release the terms of the disciplinary action,'' Greece Central School District Superintendent Barbara Deane-Williams said in the statement.

http://news.yahoo.com/students-vicio...022634219.html

------------------------


Doesnt seem like enough to me.

[UofMfan]

Jerry Sandusky Cover Up: More Disturbing Emails Released

"The only downside for us is if message isn't `heard' and acted upon and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it, but that can be assessed down the road," the email said, according to CNN.

Appalling!

[Soon]

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Prudence

Oh yeah... I forgot to mention I dont like the way he passed the bill to begin with.. it was underhanded without congressional approval, thats why it ended up on the surpreme court floor to begin with. That is not how this country is run. You dont go into a debat room in the middle of the night and come out with new laws while the lawmakers slept. I dont see this as a conservative or democrat issue.. its a process issue. And thats scarry to me.

May I ask how a bill became law 'without congressional approval'? The President cannot pass a law without Congress. In fact, the President cannot even bring a law to the floor of Congress!

On 24 Dec 2009, it passed the Senate 69 - 30
On 21 March 2010 it passed the House 219 - 212. So how are clear majorities in both houses passed without the approval of Congress?

The reason why the law ended up in the Supreme court was about the individual mandate NOT because it wasn't passed through Congress but somehow became law even though no Federal law can come into existence without the consent of Congress.

Thanks in advance for your response.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Anya:

Actually, that part of the law wasn't upheld. It simply hasn't been implemented yet and so they couldn't rule it un-Constitutional because there's nothing to base the decision on. Regardless of what we might think of that provision (and I think it is both stupid and wrong-headed) it is not on its face un-Constitutional. So once there's a test case then that, too, will go up to the SCOTUS and they'll likely strike it down as well.

Cheers
Aj

Originally Posted by *Anya*

Hi Kobi,

I may be wrong but based on the portion they upheld, they are still allowing police officers to ask for "papers please" to what, prove if they are not legal immigrants? Then they get to check with the Feds?

How about probable cause to stop them in the first place? Asking for papers, to me, smacks of a police state.

I could be wrong but that's what I read when I read your link. If I am incorrect in how I read "papers please" (and of course the police will say please); then mea culpa.

"WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday delivered a split decision in the Obama administration's challenge to Arizona's aggressive immigration law, striking multiple provisions but upholding the "papers please" provision.

Civil rights groups argue the latter measure, a centerpiece of S.B. 1070, invites racial profiling.
Monday's decision on "papers please" -- Section 2(B) in S.B. 1070 -- rested on the more technical issue of whether the law unconstitutionally invaded the federal government's exclusive prerogative to set immigration policy. The justices found that it was not clear whether Arizona was supplanting or supporting federal policy by requiring state law enforcement to demand immigration papers from anyone stopped, detained or arrested in the state who officers reasonably suspect is in the country without authorization.

The provision that was upheld -- at least for now -- also commands police to check all arrestees' immigration status with the federal government before they are released."

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Prudence

I dont like the supreme courts decission.. I think it has found a loop hole in what apears to me a movement almost toward dictatorship.

Then the bar for dictatorship has been lowered quite a bit.

Im sure the taxation point was argured quite well on the floor of the supreme court and it won out. Ok .. so we can be taxed.. got it.. how about if at the end of the year.. the medical community has to turn over its billing to the federal govenment(see where this is still going) so that each who files income tax is matched up to that list to see if they have any outstanding medical bills .. if they do then tax them..

Actually, that's not how it works. The individual mandate is an elegant solution to the free rider problem. This might take a bit to explain so bear with me. Imagine you could avoid carrying insurance coverage until you actually *needed* insurance coverage? Imagine that you then only buy insurance coverage when you're sick and drop it when you're well. If that were the case, then the entire model of insurance breaks down because it only works because young workers (who use their health insurance less often) pay in more than they take out and older workers (who use it more often) take out more than they put in. Any person who 'opts-out' of insurance coverage when they are healthy and takes it up when they are ill is a free rider (meaning they are gaining the benefit without the attendant cost). ALL the individual mandate does--ALL IT DOES--is dictate that you carry health insurance and if you choose *not* to you are assessed a tax penalty (meaning that there's a tax break you do *not* get).

..Either way the federal govenment is "dictating" something as individual as your privite health care issues.

No, they are not.

. be it from the consumer or the provider.. They want that informantion. If this is truly upheld.. you will find that there will be limits then placed on procedures and recovery times for indivuals, services will be cut,

Not only is this not the case but we have that already, it's called--wait for it--health insurance. Why is it the very essence of dictatorship if there are limits placed on procedures and recovery times if it is the government (which isn't happening under this law by the way) but it is the very essence of freedom if Aetna or Kaiser or Blue Cross does the very same thing? Please don't say "you can always buy health insurance on the private market". Ask someone with rheumatoid arthritis or MS or breast cancer how the tender mercies of the private insurance market has been toward them.

it will eventually be that you will have to go through a governmental process to see if your condition is even worth addressing by the health care community. They will be dictating what meds can be dispensed .. at what cost and rate..

Again, we have that already it's called health insurance and it is done NOT out of some calculus of medical necessity but out of profit. Aetna, United Healthcare, Blue Cross are not systems for providing health care, they are systems for *denying* medical claims. The idea is for Aetna to pay as few claims and as little money on those claims as the law will allow. If Aetna could take what my employer pays for my health insurance and deny every single claim legally, they would absolutely do so.

because they can only tax a certian precentage Heath care is not a one size fits all. I do understand that privite insurance will still exsit.. until it doesnt.

Private insurance will be with us for the foreseeable future.

The most basic of human instint is survival..What would you do for a person who is standing over you holding the very pill that would enable you to take your next breath. Its a wolf in sheeps clothing yall.

Ummm, when I had my appendix out I went into the hospital on Tuesday morning, they took my appendix out late Tuesday/early Wednesday (I was in the recovery room around 2:30 in the morning or so) and I was *home* Wednesday afternoon. I spent more time in the hospital waiting to get into surgery than I spent in the hospital *after* surgery. When I told my boss that Thursday I would be in on Monday she told me that wasn't happening because I'd just had a serious surgery. I said "that's not possible, if it were major surgery I'd still be in the hospital". My boss' husband was a doctor and he called me and let me know that the reason I was home was my *insurance* company demanded that I be sent home not because it was medically advisable. So, again, I return to the question: why is it a Bad Thing if the government has any cost controls on health care but it is the very essence of Freedom and Love of Mother for my insurance provider to send me home 12 hours after my appendix ruptured on the operating table?

Cheers
Aj

[Okiebug61]

Originally Posted by Prudence

Oh yeah... I forgot to mention I dont like the way he passed the bill to begin with.. it was underhanded without congressional approval, thats why it ended up on the surpreme court floor to begin with. That is not how this country is run. You dont go into a debat room in the middle of the night and come out with new laws while the lawmakers slept. I dont see this as a conservative or democrat issue.. its a process issue. And thats scarry to me.

Here is a link that shows the step by step process of how a bill becomes a law.

http://www.senate.gov/reference/reso...sflowchart.pdf

[Corkey]

Heres my story.
In for a hernia repair. Outpatient in surgery 45 minutes, in recovery about an hour released to home. Recovery estimated time 6 weeks.


Total hysterectomy with fibroid removal, be there 2 hours for pre surgical, surgery 2.5 hours, recovery 3 days instead of the 4-5 Dr. thought.
Home care I pay for out of my Medicare payments and supplemental insurance. Recovery time estimated ?

At no point in time was there any milking of the system, padding of hospitalization, or misuse of Medical polices and procedures.
I pay out of pocket copay of $400.00 for hospital stay and copays to specialists of $30.00

Total of aprox $530.00 for major surgery. This is the way it is supposed to work, I don't know what system Prudence is under, but it isn't factual.

[Nat]

For anybody who would like to donate toward the medical care of the surviving (uninsured) member of the young lesbian couple shot last week near Corpus: https://www.wepay.com/donations/127673

Mary Kristene Chapa, Texas Lesbian Shot in Head, Regains Consciousness
Monday, Jul 2, 2012 at 3:36 PM
By Erin Sherbert
Comments (3)

www.wepay.com/donations/127673

A week after 18-year-old Mary Kristene Chapa and her girlfriend Mollie Olgin were shot in the head at a South Texas park, Chapa has opened her eyes and started to communicate, using writing and sign language.

According to media reports, Chapa's brother and sister could hardly recognize her when they arrived at the hospital the day she was discovered; doctors say it's almost unheard of for someone to survive this type of gunshot wound.

But the girl 's brother, Hilario Chapa, says his little sister has started asking questions about her condition and recovery. She has even written down "Mollie" several times, inquiring about her girlfriend, who was also shot in the head but did not survive.

Hilario Chapa says he has not told his sister, who goes by her middle name, Kristene, that Olgin was killed. "I'm kind of afraid," he told NBC. "She is in such a fragile state right now."


Kristene and Mollie
No word on whether police have started to interview her, but Hilario Chapa says he thinks Kristene remembers what happened, but is not ready to talk about it. "I'm under the impression that she doesn't know" who did it, he said.

Police told reporters that an eyewitness described the shooter as a white man with dark hair in his 20s. He was 5-foot-8 and weighed about 140 pounds, according to press reports.

Police are not yet investigating the shooting as a hate crime; however, LGBT communities across the nation, including San Francisco, rallied around the two girls, who had been involved in a same-sex relationship since February.

At this point, family and friends are just focused on Chapa's recovery, which will take both a lot of time and money. Her father had just taken a new job and does not yet have health insurance. As the hospital bills mount, the family is welcoming all donations to help with Kristene's recovery.

[Kobi]

California, the battleground state for the arguments for and against same-sex marriage, is now considering an unconventional law that would allow children to be legally granted more than two parents.

The bill -- SB1476 -- would apply equally to men and women, and to homosexual or heterosexual relationships. Proposed by State Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, it has passed the Senate and awaits an Assembly vote.

Leno cites the evolving American family, which includes surrogacy arrangements, same-sex marriages and reproductive techniques that involve multiple individuals.

"The bill brings California into the 21st century, recognizing that there are more than 'Ozzie and Harriet' families today," Leno told the Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco."

http://news.yahoo.com/three-daddies-...ws-health.html

[Nat]

This actually is on the main google new page right now:

Mermaids do not exist.

:'(

[*Anya*]

Time Healthland

Drug Giant GlaxoSmithKline and the
Billion-Dollar Wrongdoing
July 5, 2012
By Alexandra Sifferlin

In the largest settlement involving a pharmaceutical company, the U.S. Justice Department announced on July 2 that GlaxoSmithKline LLC will pay $3 billion in fines and plead guilty to marketing drugs for unapproved uses and failing to report drug safety information to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The criminal charges involved the illegal marketing of the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin and the withholding of data on the health risks of the diabetes medication Avandia.

For these charges, Glaxo will pay a criminal fine of $1 billion. The other $2 billion will go toward fines for a civil settlement involving the sales and marketing of several of the company’s other drugs, including the asthma drug Advair. Glaxo did not admit to any wrongdoing in the civil case.

The company had already set aside $3 billion in cash in November, when the terms of the settlements were initially announced. The sum sounds large, but it is only a portion of the drug maker’s profits from the drugs involved. The Wall Street Journal reports that prosecutors are unsure how much Glaxo made specifically from marketing its drugs for unapproved uses — an illegal practice known as off-label marketing — but it’s possible that its profits exceeded the $3 billion fees. The New York Times reports also that the fines represent a fraction of what Glaxo made from the drugs overall:

Avandia, for example, racked up $10.4 billion in sales, Paxil brought in $11.6 billion, and Wellbutrin sales were $5.9 billion during the years covered by the settlement, according to IMS Health, a data group that consults for drugmakers.

“So a $3 billion settlement for half a dozen drugs over 10 years can be rationalized as the cost of doing business,” [Patrick Burns, spokesman for the whistle-blower advocacy group Taxpayers Against Fraud] said.

The settlement covers improper Glaxo practices from the late-1990s to mid-2000s. Based on claims by whistle blowers — four Glaxo employees — prosecutors said the company tried to get doctors to prescribe drugs off-label by buying them spa treatments and lavish trips, and in the case of Paxil, helping to publish a paper in a medical journal that misreported clinical trial data.

Here’s how the company broke the law:

Paxil
Although the antidepressant Paxil is not approved for patients under 18, Glaxo illegally marketed the drug for use in children and teens, offering kickbacks to doctors and sales representatives to push the drug.

A government probe was launched in 2002, and it was discovered that Paxil, as well as several other antidepressants, were no more effective than placebo in treating depression in kids. Indeed, between 1994 and 2001, Glaxo conducted three clinical trails of Paxil’s safety and efficacy in treating depression in patients under 18, and all three studies failed to pass muster.

One clinical trial, known as Study 329, found that teens who took the drug for depression were more likely to attempt suicide attempt than those receiving placebo pills. Glaxo hired a company to prepare a medical journal article that downplayed Paxil’s safety risks, including increased risk of suicide, and misrepresented data to trump up the positive results of the study. The article was published in 2001, falsely reporting that Paxil was an effective treatment for child depression.

Prosecutors accused Glaxo sales representatives of then using the article to promote the use of the drug for depressed youth. Sales reps invited prescribing psychiatrists to luxury resorts for “Paxil forum meetings” where they were treated to fancy dinners and free entertainment like sailing trips and balloon rides.

Reports of teens committing suicide while taking Paxil began surfacing in 2003, and the FDA discovered that 10 of the 93 Paxil patients in Study 329 had attempted suicide or thought about it, versus one out of the 87 patients on placebo. In 2004, the FDA added a black-box warning on the drug’s label about the increased risk of suicidal thoughts in teens who take it.

Wellbutrin
Glaxo used the help of PR firms and the appeal of lavish vacations to convince medical professionals to prescribe the antidepressant Wellbutrin for weight loss, sexual dysfunction, drug addiction and ADHD, even though the drug is FDA approved only to treat depression. Tavy Deming, an attorney for one of the whistle blowers, told the AP that during a regional meeting of sales representatives in Las Vegas in 2000, the reps were told to promote Wellbutrin as the drug that makes patients “happy, horny and skinny,” as part of a national slogan repeated to doctors.

Among several physicians accused of taking payments from Glaxo to push Wellbutrin is celebrity doctor Drew Pinsky, who was named in court documents for accepting $275,000 for “services for Wellbutrin.” Pinsky allegedly took the money in two payments in 1999 for “extolling the virtues of the antidepressant ‘in settings where it did not appear that [he] was speaking for GSK,’ according to the Justice Department,” the New York Daily News reports.

Company employees who successfully included unapproved uses of Wellbutrin in their pitches got bonuses. Employees who had a problem with giving doctors kickbacks to prescribe Wellbutrin improperly were put on leave, prosecutors said.

Avandia
For seven years, Glaxo failed to report data to the FDA showing that its blockbuster diabetes drug, Avandia — approved in 1999 — increased heart risks in patients. In 2007, Dr. Steven Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and a longtime critic of Avandia, published an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine that showed that the drug increased the risk of heart attack by more than 40% in people with Type 2 diabetes.

It was early public evidence that the Glaxo-sponsored data on which the government based its safety review for approval were flawed and minimized the heart risks to diabetes patients.

Nissen’s study used the drug maker’s own data, from trials that had been conducted but never reported. By the time Nissen’s study came out, the drug was a bonafide blockbuster, earning billions of dollars and being taken by millions of patients.

The heart risks were by this time becoming clearer, and Glaxo reviewed the data in 2005 and 2006; internal analyses showed 29% and 31% increases in heart risks in Type 2 diabetes patients. In 2006, Glaxo reported the data to the FDA — but it was only a portion of the data Glaxo had, from 15 tests of Avandia before the end of 2006; the agency didn’t make the information public immediately either, instead asking one of its own statisticians to review the findings.

The public remained largely uninformed, and Glaxo continued to promote the drug’s benefits while its sales reps denied the heart risks.

Then, as part of a settlement with New York over Glaxo’s failure to disclose the suicide risks of its antidepressant drug Paxil (see above), the company agreed to put all of its recent clinical trials on its website. Nissen downloaded the available data on Avandia — 42 trials — wrote up his paper and in May 2007 sent it the New England Journal.

In 2007, the drug was banned in Europe. The European Medicines Agency concluded that the heart risks of Avandia did not justify its blood sugar benefits, and since alternatives were available, there was no need to prescribe it.

In 2010, an FDA advisory panel voted on whether to pull the drug from the U.S. market. Ultimately, the agency decided to allow continued sales of Avandia, but severely restricted its use: to prescribe the drug, doctors must now be certified to do so, and they may give it only to patients who have been treated safely with it before, have been made aware of the risks of the drug and have failed to control their blood sugar with other medications.

Dr. Nissen described the FDA’s move as “a decade-long nightmare coming to an end.”

However, Glaxo says the civil settlement is not an does not admission of any liability or wrongdoing in the selling and marketing of Avandia and they dispute some of the claims.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/0...ar-wrongdoing/

[Andrea]

Parents charged in UAE after hidden baby found in carry-on

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/world/meast/uae-baby-discovered-airport/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

An Egyptian couple has been charged with putting their child at risk and attempted smuggling after security officers at an airport in the United Arab Emirates found their 5-month-old boy hidden in a small handbag.

[Kobi]

This is something that happened to a friend of mine in her own words.

“So, on Friday night my friend and I were at her house and wanted to get out and do something for the evening. We brainstormed ideas and she brought up the idea of seeing a show at the Laugh Factory. I’d never been, I thought it sounded fun, so we went. We saw that Dane Cook, along some other names we didn’t recognize we’re playing, and while we both agree that Cook’s style is not really our taste we were opened-minded about what the others had to offer. And we figured even good ol’ Dane can be funny sometimes, even if it’s not really our thing. Anyhoo, his act was actually fine, but then when his was done, some other guy I didn’t recognize took the stage. Of course, I would find out later this was Daniel Tosh, but at the time I thought he was just some yahoo who somehow got a gig going on after Cook. I honestly thought he was an amateur because he didn’t seem that comfortable on stage and seemed to have a really awkward presence.


So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

Now in the lobby, I spoke with the girl at the will-call desk, and demanded to see the manager. The manager on duty quickly came out to speak with me, and she was profusely apologetic, and seemed genuinely sorry about what had happened, but of course we received no refund for our tickets, but instead a comped pair of tickets, although she admitted she understood if we never wanted to come back. I can imagine the Laugh Factory doesn’t really have a policy in place for what happens when a woman has to leave in a hurry because the person onstage is hurling violent words about sexual violence at her. Although maybe I’m not the first girl to have that happen to her.

I should probably add that having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.”

Please reblog and spread the word.

http://breakfastcookie.tumblr.com/po...-a-comedy-club

[Kobi]

Former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno and other top university officials acted with "total disregard" for the children sexually abused by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky because of their fear of "bad publicity," a report by the university's internal investigation said today.

The report was released at the conclusion of the investigation led by former FBI director Louis Freeh, who was hired to find out why officials who knew of child molestation accusations failed to stop Sandusky or report him to police.

The report said that Paterno, along with officials Tim Curley, Gary Schultz, and former president Graham Spanier, "repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse from the authorities," and it blamed those four men for failing to stop Sandusky and protect other chidlren from his harm. Read the full report.

The four officials showed a "striking lack of empathy" for the victims of Sandusky's abuse and empowered the former assitant coach to continue abusing, the report said.

The report was released after eight months of investigation, launched in November by the university's Board of Trustees after the arrest of Sandusky, Curley, and Schultz, and the firing of Paterno and resignation of Spanier.

Report

[Hollylane]

Will Congress Let Monsanto Write Its Own Rules?

Co-Authored by Colin O'Neil, Regulatory Policy Analyst at the Center for Food Safety

The agricultural biotech industry -- well, let's call it what it really is: the chemical industry -- has gone on the offensive as never before with a set of slippery policy riders to the House Farm Bill. It's a new low even for an industry that has spent years and tens of millions of lobbying dollars trying to dismantle the basic safeguards that stand between a regulated, healthy food supply and the profit margins chemical industry executives pine for. If passed, these riders would undermine the few laws that are currently in place to protect farmers' rights, our health and our environment from the many adverse impacts of genetically engineered (GE) crops.

Waking to the news this morning that the bill reported out of committee late last night with this suite of riders perfectly intact should give everyone interested in a safer, more secure food supply (and U.S. economy, for that matter) a definite chill, even during these incredibly hot July days. Why? Because one important question has become very real: Will Congress let the chemical industry write its own rules?

Deliberately buried in the House Agriculture Committee's voluminous discussion draft of the 2012 Farm Bill, these significant changes to the Plant Protection Act (PPA) -- one of the few statues that regulate GE crops -- will counter the gains that have been made to protect our food supply and the farmers who grow it. The provisions (Sections 10011, 10013 and 10014) would force the rushed commercialization of GE crops, create a backdoor approval for Dow's "Agent Orange" corn and eliminate any meaningful review of the impacts of these novel crops.

Science and time have shown that GE crops cause significant harm to agriculture and the environment. The overwhelming majority of these novel crops are engineered to be resistant to herbicides, such as Monsanto's Roundup, and have dramatically increased overall herbicide use by 382 million lbs. This spike has, in turn, caused an epidemic scourge of herbicide-resistant superweeds. And they have caused repeated transgenic contamination of non-biotech crop, costing farmers and businesses billions of dollars, as well as permanent contamination of the wild.

Federal courts have ruled for farmers, businesses and public interest plaintiffs numerous times, holding that USDA had violated federal law when approving GE crops by failing to adequately consider and regulate their harms. But rather than address these continued failures, the chemical industry's allies in Congress are trying to change the law via the Farm Bill. The logic being: if you can't win the game, change the rules.

These changes, if allowed to become law, would have numerous negative impacts and outlaw responsible governance. For example, one proposed rider would outlaw any review of GE crops' impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and other environmental laws. This suite of "biotech riders" would have a devastating impact on our country's protection of endangered species. It would also outlaw review by any agency other than the USDA. As a result, the potential impacts of GE crops, including increased pesticide use, on endangered species and other wildlife would not be assessed by our expert wildlife agencies, allowing a GE crop approval to go forward, even if it would cause the extinction of a protected species. Such changes in regulation leave our protected wildlife populations in severe jeopardy and undermine the agencies working hard to ensure their survival. Instead, USDA would only be required to perform narrow, newly established cursory environmental analysis. It even goes so far as to prohibit the Department from using any funds to conduct any additional environmental analyses, even if a federal judge deems such analyses necessary.

To make matters worse, the proposed riders include several means for "backdoor" approvals of GE crops. One rider would allow potentially dangerous GE crops to be commercialized without necessary safety assessments by establishing deliberately impossible deadlines for USDA to meet. Under this provision, if USDA fails to review and approve a GE crop within the short agency deadline, an immediate "default" approval and commercialization would be granted. Thus commercialization of novel GE crops could occur without any agency analysis, let alone any approval, taking place. This new one-year deadline to approve or deny an application (with an optional 180-day extension) will put unreasonable pressure on the Department and will undoubtedly impact its willingness to even attempt rigorous risk assessments.

It's no secret -- our federal agencies are underfunded and already swamped with the important task of reviewing and assessing new industry products, including GE crops. To suggest that approval of new crops that are resistant to toxic pesticides -- like 2,4-D and Dicamba -- should occur "automatically," without a thorough environmental and economic analysis, is absurd. It flies in the face of farmers' basic rights to grow their crop of choice, be protected from transgenic contamination and not be subjected to chemical drift from the use of ever-increasingly higher levels of toxic herbicides.

But it doesn't stop there. The riders also open up a proposed second backdoor approval opportunity for GE crops that have gone through an initial public comment period and are currently under review by the USDA. Under this condition, if USDA is unable to approve or deny a crop application within 90 days of the Farm Bill passage, then the crop would be deemed approved. That's right. If USDA can't get through the process on schedule -- a schedule created to make sure they won't -- then all the safeguards come down and a new GE crop enters the public sphere without a regulatory roadblock in its way.

And if that doesn't sound serious enough for you, consider the fact that one of the crops that this could apply to is Dow's 2,4-D corn. Some know it better as "Agent Orange" corn, a GE crop engineered to withstand exposure to one of the chemicals in the infamous Vietnam-era herbicide. There's no doubt about it, the deadlines would be impossible to meet given the volume of public and scientific comments the Department receives (the agency received over 350,000 on the proposed Dow corn approval alone) and the number of applications currently being considered.

Conventional (non-biotech) and organic farmers, as well as grain handlers, grain millers and processors have already suffered substantial economic losses in the past due to transgenic contamination from GE crops. If these proposed provisions become law, the Secretary of Agriculture may be unable to prevent costly contamination episodes, like Starlink corn or Liberty Link rice, which result in market rejection, loss of foreign and domestic markets and untold millions of dollars in lost revenue to farmers and the food industry.

But the chemical interests thought of that, too. They've inserted a rider that would compel USDA to establish an extremely controversial national policy for the "low-level presence" of GE material in crops, setting for the first time an acceptable level of GE contamination in non-GE crops in the U.S. The disassociation of the chemical industry's priorities from reality is almost inexplicable. Consumer demand for GE-free foods is higher than ever, both in the U.S. and abroad. Any policy that intentionally allows for GE material in crops and does nothing to prevent contamination of conventional and organic crops poses serious and irreversible economic harm to thousands of farmers, handlers, food processors and manufacturers. And beyond that, this illogical and unreasonable policy would severely impact the capability to export U.S. agricultural products to vital foreign markets that have restrictions on GE material in food.

American agriculture is at a crossroads. The mere fact that these riders are actually under discussion in today's House Agriculture Committee Farm Bill mark-up session is a testament to the changed reality we are facing. Far from moving closer to a safer, healthier and better regulated food supply, we're all witness to an attempted shift away from those principles -- delivering our regulatory and decision-making powers over U.S. agriculture into the hands of industry. It's a scary scenario.

So, will Congress let the chemical industry write its own rules? For the sake of all American farmers, consumers and the environment, let's hope the House Agriculture Committee and other members of Congress will see the true intent of these riders and strike them from the Farm Bill before more damage is done.

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At a California racetrack the souped-up cars that have been revving their way around the circuit stop and fall silent.

Their roar is replaced by a deeply soulful rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner as a gigantic American flag is unfurled across the course as part of 4 July celebrations.

The race commentator, Wild Wayne, gives a patriotic pep talk emphasising that Independence Day means more than an opportunity to eat hot dogs and sink a few Buds.

For a nation so geographically isolated from any rivals and for a people so brimming with self-confidence it still amazes me how much emphasis is placed on the very word "American", whether it is placed before "hero" or "race car", as an affirmation of identity.

Mind you, when I observe that America must be the most showily patriotic country in the world, an American friend points out the celebration of the Queen's Jubilee in Britain was hardly discreet and muted.

Still, I think there is a nostalgic nuance to our patriotism, whereas America has traditionally looked to the future.
Unstoppable damage

But the US is changing and at the moment there is an uneasy edge to the pride and the patriotism.

There have been a whole host of books about American decline. There is also a more general malaise, a worry that America, still the biggest economic and military power in the world, has lost its place and its way.
Race cars Only a few people at the race track felt happy with the direction the country was moving in

Such fretting is not exactly new, but there are differences between today and the Sputnik moment, or of fears of Japan's rise, or of post-Vietnam angst.

For a start, conservatives argue that President Barack Obama has embraced decline, and made America less forceful on the world stage and less successful at home.

Some of those I spoke to at the racetrack thought the country was coming back up, and going in the right direction, but they were a small minority.

More typical were these comments:

"It's going in the toilet. The economy is shot, the government sucks. I think America is still number one but it won't be if they carry on this way"
"The direction is going down, we're starting to struggle"
"I'm not really happy, I want my old America back. I think we're slowly dropping, we've lost our edge and need to be the dominant force again."

But others argue it is the right who are to blame, by allowing for no compromise, and so giving the impression that politics itself is broken and useless.

The British journalist Ed Luce, whose book Time To Start Thinking is subtitled America In The Age Of Descent, argues that its failure to invest in infrastructure, research and education has been hugely damaging.

He told me: "The American dream no longer exists. If you compare income mobility, for example, you're twice as likely to move up an income group - up a class - in Canada or Germany as you would in the US.

"You're as likely to move up a class in Britain, and Britain's at the bottom of the league. It's got to stop these trends; otherwise it'll cease to be the America we admire; and I think it's to a large extent already ceasing, or has ceased, to be the America we admire.

"That foundational creed of a country that offers equality of opportunity, of a country that has great class mobility, that's much more seriously that soft power you'd associate with America, its universal attractiveness.

"That's really in headlong decline and I think that is a far more serious sense of concern than the relative economic decline that we should expect anyway with China and India and others lifting themselves out of poverty."
'Sense of loss'

Luce says that middle class income has been hollowed-out and unless there is a return to a more pragmatic politics the damage will be unstoppable.
Race cars Experts say America will look and feel strong for decades to come

"This deepens all the time, this trend; to go from a third of the world economy just 12 years ago to under a quarter now is unprecedented in any historic comparison. This is a headlong relative decline that America is in; and that's likely to accelerate unless America regains its sense of pragmatism.

"Pragmatism is a word coined in this country, it's the American philosophy; it's about repairing your faults and it's missing in action, and it's been missing in action for quite a long time, and unless Washington can regain it, this is going to steepen this decline, it's going to get more accelerated."
Limited influence

Not everyone agrees. Most Americans think decline can be halted, if it even exists in the first place.

Robert Kagan, author of The World America Made, says that the world would be a different - a worse place - without a strong America. But he feels the worries about decline have been overdone.

"I think at any time when you have a deep economic recession, which the US has been in, people tend to get pessimistic. The US has repeatedly gone through periods of declinism, concern that other countries were passing it, whether it was Japan, the Soviet Union, and now China.

"But I think if you look at it analytically and from a historical perspective I don't think there is any reason to think America really is in decline.

"Now people have a mythical sense of the past, today people say the US can't get what it really wants anymore, can't tell other countries what to do, it doesn't seem to be able to solve the Middle East peace crisis and my answer is: when could it? When did the United States have all this power?

"American influence is always more limited than people think. Nevertheless, America is still the most influential power in the world today."

Kagan says that part of the problem is that people lump together America's challengers abroad as the Brics.

He argues a rising Brazil or India is not a threat to America, and the focus is really China. He says the rise of that country has actually made others in the region need America more.

"I subscribe to the theory that what goes up must come down and eventually the US will lose influence, I just am not convinced we're there yet.

"I'm not saying there is nothing to worry about, the US has significant fiscal problems that it has to address and we have not addressed it so far and I hope in the future we will. But the idea that the Americans are worried about the state of the country is deep in the DNA.

"You can look at practically every 10 or 20 years throughout American history, there's been this sense of loss, of something lost, of a decline. Eventually it'll be right, I just don't think its right now."

At the racetrack a gleaming red car, which had been flying a large stars and stripes out of a back window is at the back of the pack, overtaken by all the others. It eventually has to limp off the track and give up the game.

That is not going to happen to America. Even if decline in relative power is inevitable, it has such economic influence and military might that it will look and feel strong for decades to come.

The notion of "decline" lumps together questions about the domestic economy, power abroad, political direction and simply the mood of the people - so no simple conclusion is likely to be correct.

Indeed, it is possibly more important to ask the right questions than have the right answers.

And the real question is whether there is a trend, and whether sharp political divisions at home and the problems they leave unsolved undermine America's quest to find its rightful place in a changing world.