The bottom line is that we have no protections against the arbitrary and discriminatory policies of the health insurance companies.I wonder when President Obama will live up to his many promises on health care reform, and work to require Health Insurance Companies to cover pre-existing conditions.
The Democratic Party should not support this man's run for office. We should all support a challenger. Perhaps Joe Sestak?At several other points, Specter did lay out areas in which he had "diverged materially from the Republican line," including raising the minimum wage, the stimulus package and abortion rights. But he went to great lengths to insist that he did not, as reported, tell Democratic leadership or the White House that he would be a loyal party member.
"I did not say," he told host David Gregory, "I would be a loyal Democrat. I did not say that."
Fuck that! We are not "falling in line" if Obama replaces a liberal judge with a mushy centrist who will collapse on essential issues such as consumer rights, gay rights, women's rights or human rights. The President will find that as he continues to adopt Bush administraiton positions, he will begin adopting the popularity of the former President as well.But the process to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter could pump new oxygen into national debates over abortion, immigration, minority rights, limits to privacy and other matters that often animate large grassroots organizations, which have been comparatively quiet in recent months.
"There's no doubt these debates are coming back," said Matt Bennett, vice president of the centrist Democratic group Third Way. They might create more noise than suspense, he said, because there is little doubt that the Democratic-dominated Senate will confirm Obama's eventual choice. Liberal activists will "fall in line" even if they are not entirely satisfied with the administration's progress on their pet issues, Bennett said.
Authorities executed the 23-year-old woman Friday in northern Iran without informing her lawyer or allowing the family to be present, said the lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei. She was 17 at the time the crime was committed, in 2003.An innocent girl took the fall for her boyfriend. He gets 10 years, she is killed.
...The prisoner executed Friday, Delara Darabi, initially pleaded guilty to killing her father's cousin, but later retracted her confession and said her boyfriend carried out the killing. She told a judge that she had initially confessed because her boyfriend told her that, as a minor, she would not be executed and she could save him from being put to death, her lawyer said.
Her boyfriend, who was 19 at the time of the killing, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for complicity in murder.
...Mostafaei said the court did not seriously consider his arguments in the woman's defense.
For example, he said, Darabi was left-handed, while all the evidence suggests the crime was committed by someone who was right-handed.
The lawyer said Darabi called her parents just moments before the execution. He quoted her as saying, "Oh, Mother, I see the hangman's noose in front of me. They are going to execute me. Please save me."This is murder, plain, simple, brutal. The US State Department (contact info) should call Iran out on this. Iran deserves to be shamed in front of the international community.
Justice David Souter, who was among the most active questioners in defense of the Voting Rights Act, said Coleman's claim seemed "to deny the empirical reality" of the contemporary instances of bias Congress documented in the states.And quite the empirical reality there is. Take Voter ID laws, for example:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested by her questions that she, too, believed the law was necessary to prevent backsliding in voting rights. Similar sentiment was expressed by the two other liberal justices, John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer.
Texas is considering such a law. Unfortunately, these types of laws typically adversely affect the poor, people of color, people with disabilities and the elderly. Some estimates suggest that the number of eligible voters without acceptable identification is as high as 12 percent.Note that Coleman, the attorney arguing against the Voting Rights Act, is representing a district in Texas. Voter ID legislation is one of many scurrilous tactics employed by the right wing to suppress votes. And this is done precisely because a legal avenue opened up:
So what do the conservative judges say?The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states may require identification other than a voter registration card. That doesn't mean Texas should. It would be wrong to make voting more difficult for law-abiding citizens without good reason. Having enough votes to do it isn't a good reason.
The more conservative justices appeared to strongly believe the law has run its course. Chief Justice John Roberts said of Congress' repeated renewal of the 1965 act: "At some point, it begins to look like it's going to go on forever."Just what universe does Justice Scalia live in?
Justice Antonin Scalia said that much of the evidence of government bias against black people and other minorities was documented "a long time ago."
Defending the law were Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal and Debo Adegbile of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.16 thousand pages of testimony!Both lawyers emphasized the difficulty of bringing individual voting bias cases and said Congress wanted to ensure that unfair policies could be caught before they took effect.
Katyal said Congress compiled 16,000 pages of testimony and determined that its work in this area was not done.
this insane "we've got them right where we want them" whining from the right and the pseudo-libertarians sems desperate to imply that Democrats are inherently just as big a pile of screw-ups as Republicans, so naturally they're going to crash and burn just as badly as... umm... they did.Ha!It's like a bunch of arsonists telling firemen as they rush into a building "you guys suck. That building is totally on fire."
Obama is so obsessed with batting down his domestic “enemies” that it doesn’t matter if America’s real enemies are strengthened in the process. What was Obama’s goal in releasing the CIA torture memos, against the advice of his top terrorism and intelligence advisors?There isn't even a trace of self-awareness or accuracy to be found. While Bush did attack political enemies domestically (and enemies of choice internationally) at the documented expense of our national security, Obama has focused his energy on solving problems directly and at their source. The CIA torture memos were already public.
Citizens engaged in a grassroots Tea Party movement clearly are perceived as a bigger threat to Obama than evil forces intent on destroying America.The Tea Party "movement" has been funded and organized by all the usual players intent on using astroturfing strategies to fake grassroots support for an otherwise unsustainable politics. It is clear that the so called PUMA movement is a part of that right wing strategy.
The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits.The cruelty towards these animals and alarming lack of health concerns are quite apparent. But how they treat the refuse from these pigs is nothing less than startling (emphasis mine):
Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems.
When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.
Just how toxic is this stuff? Fucking scary as hell, you go in you don't come out toxic (emphasis mine):Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.That can't be good for the people stuck living nearby, can it?
People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison-control center and described her symptoms. "Ma'am," the poison-control officer told her, "the only symptoms of hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately." When you fly over eastern North Carolina, you realize that virtually everyone in this part of the state lives close to a lagoon.At least they aren't feeding pigs dead pigs:
Millions of factory-farm hogs -- one study puts it at ten percent -- die before they make it to the killing floor. Some are taken to rendering plants, where they are propelled through meat grinders and then fed cannibalistically back to other living hogs.That's just begging for prions to spread.
