Obama Web Site : Fight the Smears

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Obama has launched a web site to take on
malicious rumors about him, his family, and his campaign. Running this would be a 24/7 job for more than one person.

Guess I’m showing my geezerhood but it still amazes and confounds me that some slimy son of a bitch can fabricate a lie, throw it out on the Internet, and immediately it acquires a certain aura of “truth.”

Anyway, here’s the link to Fight the Smears. You can even see a copy of his birth certificate, and yes, he was born in Hawaii, and yes his name is really Barack Hussain Obama II.’

The truth shall make you free and piss a lotta fascists off.

twisty / The Rag Blog / June 12, 2008

Go to Fight the Smears

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Fox News : "Obama’s Baby Mama"

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Fox Forced to Address Michelle Obama Headline
By Jim Rutenberg / June 12, 2008

For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.

The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.

The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, “Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” It was first publicized on Wednesday by Alex Koppelman of Salon.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one “chiefly in African-American usage” that refers to, “The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.”

Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.’’ Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.

Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.

In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.

Source. / The Caucus / NYT

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Singin’ on Thursday – Save the Country

Posted on June 13, 2008 by RagBlog

Rosanne Cash with Rodney Crowell

This tune comes thanks to Betsy Gaines. It is Rosanne Cash singing Save the Country.


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BushCo Demands Are Unacceptable to Many Iraqis

Posted on June 13, 2008 by RagBlog


Iraq officials question need for U.S. troop presence
By Ned Parker / June 11, 2008

Negotiations are underway between the two countries to decide how long troops will stay. The U.S. is scaling back its forces.

BAGHDAD — Officials in Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s ruling coalition are questioning whether Iraq needs a U.S. military presence even as the two countries press forward with high-pressure negotiations to determine how long American forces will remain.

Some officials in Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party and his larger Shiite United Iraqi Alliance bloc, which has cooperated with the U.S., have spoken in favor of imposing severe restrictions on U.S. forces after the United Nations mandate authorizing their presence expires at the end of the year.

Maliki and President Bush last year outlined goals for an agreement covering military, trade and cultural relations. They pledged to return Iraq to full sovereignty and said the agreement was expected to be finalized by July 31.

According to Iraqis, Americans supported a draft of the agreement that called for allowing U.S. forces to detain Iraqis and conduct missions without the government’s permission. They have also said the Americans required up to 58 permanent bases, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity for troops and contractors.

American officials have refused to disclose their negotiating stance and have accused their critics of deliberately distorting U.S. positions.

David Satterfield, the State Department’s senior advisor on Iraq, said Tuesday that the U.S. remained committed to an agreement by late July. He denied that the U.S. was pushing demands that infringed upon Iraq’s independence.

“We want to see Iraqi sovereignty strengthened, not weakened,” he said.

U.S. forces are scaling back from a massive troop buildup last year known as “the surge,” which helped put the brakes on Iraq’s civil war. U.S. troop levels are expected to drop to an estimated 140,000 by July as the Americans evaluate the effect of their military reductions on Iraq’s security. It remains to be seen whether the fragile peace between the country’s Shiite majority and onetime Sunni elite will hold if the Americans quickly leave the country.

United Iraqi Alliance lawmaker Sami Askari, who is considered a member of Maliki’s inner circle, said the changes in opinions in many cases are gradual.

“There is the camp who still believe that we need the Americans to stay and the other camp that says we don’t need them anymore,” Askari said. “You can’t draw a line, even within the Dawa Party, even within” the alliance, he said.

Shiite officials like Askari have warned there is no way any Iraqi politician could back the current U.S. security agreement proposals.

“If I’m from the group that believes in the need for the Americans to stay, and then they face me with such a draft, then I’ll say, look, I’d rather go with the others,” Askari said.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, has defended the agreement. “The recent statements you’ve heard, the recent politicking you heard by different groups has really been very unhelpful,” he said. “There has been no agreement yet.

“Secondly, most of the statements are coming from people who are unaware or not involved in the heart of this negotiating procedure. It has really been used for political brinksmanship,” Zebari said.

Senior Iraqi politicians and Western officials confirmed the friction and debate within the alliance about an agreement.

“Of course there are some people who are against it, no doubt,” said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, who is a leading negotiator on the Iraqi side. Salih vowed that the Kurds, Maliki and the country’s presidency council would get approval for a bilateral agreement despite any opposition within the alliance.

Others warned that some Dawa members were seeking to sabotage a long-term deal.

“There is a lot of misrepresentation. It is deliberate. Some people don’t want this on principle. Some people may have ideological problems with this. Now they are showing their true colors,” said a senior Iraqi official who did not wish to be identified because it could endanger his position.

He warned that even Maliki’s backing was not a given. The prime minister is faced with pressure within his party. In the past, officials have described Maliki as flip-flopping on government decisions.

The official described Dawa members as having become overconfident after successful military campaigns this spring in the southern port of Basra, Baghdad’s Sadr City and Mosul that relied heavily on U.S. air support to defeat Sunni and Shiite armed groups.

Read all of it here. / Los Angeles Times

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Old McDonald Had a Pharm…

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


…And genetically modified his goats and chickens to produce drugs for humans.

But hold on. Should we be doing this to animals?
By Elizabeth Svoboda / June 11, 2008

Encompassed by pastoral green fields, the headquarters of GTC Biotherapeutics looks like any other New England farmstead. But its serenity is deceiving. Behind barn doors, the farm’s most valuable employees — a herd of pygmy goats from New Zealand — are working round the clock, their milk glands churning out hundreds of gallons of high-grade pharmaceutical compounds.

The white gold extracted from the goats’ udders will someday command big bucks in the American healthcare marketplace — or so GTC hopes. The company’s genetically modified animals possess a human gene that allows them to produce milk rich with a protein called antithrombin, which helps prevent blood clots from forming and staves off related conditions like heart attacks and strokes

Tom Newberry, GTC’s vice president of corporate communications, leads me into a corrugated-metal hutch. Goats enclosed in pens train inquisitive rectangular pupils on us and poke their heads through the bars. “They’re looking for a handout,” Newberry says, chuckling. But we can’t give these goats kibble or even a pat on the head; that would be a breach of strict sanitary regulations.

ATryn, GTC’s goat-derived antithrombin, cleared its first regulatory hurdle in 2006 when the European Commission approved it for sale in all 25 European Union countries. This past fall, GTC successfully lobbied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to designate ATryn as a “fast-track product,” making it eligible for accelerated review on this side of the Atlantic.

But GTC is out to prove it’s no one-trick ruminant. Staff scientists have created transgenic goats that can churn out a smorgasbord of human proteins, including compounds that halt tumor blood-vessel development and blood-clotting factors for hemophiliacs. Protein-based human antibodies that protect against all kinds of diseases — from SARS to incurable cancers — could be next in the dairy pipeline.

A bevy of biotech companies is crowding the drug market with takes on the transgenic-remix concept. Origen, located in Burlingame, Calif., is developing a transgenic production line that employs chickens instead of goats as drug incubators. The company has bred birds that produce a range of human anticancer proteins and other antibodies in their eggs. In Athens, Ga., AviGenics is using a transgenic-chicken system to make a protein compound that stimulates the bone marrow to make more white blood cells — essential in helping cancer patients bounce back after chemotherapy.

“Transgenic drug technology has been in the incubation stage for a long time,” says Robert Kay, president and CEO of Origen. “But within the next five to 10 years, we should be seeing many new products in the clinic and pushing their way toward approval.” Future drug-producing menageries, he predicts, will include pigs, cows and rabbits.

While these transgenic pioneers might seem to be cruising toward FDA approval, the road is hardly without obstacles. To the frustration of executives like Kay and Newberry, most of the snags are not financial or logistical but arise from people’s reflexive reactions — as in, Omigod, they’re putting human genes into animals! It’s “The Island of Dr. Moreau” made real.

But the revulsion to transgenic animals is more than reflexive; some animal biologists say biotech companies are overselling the safety of the resulting drugs. Meanwhile, ethicists question whether we should be restyling animals as drug producers at all.

GTC transforms goats into drug factories thanks to a recently perfected biological sleight of hand. Once a goat embryo is artificially fertilized in the lab, technicians zero in on the portion of the goat’s genome that codes for a sugar found in goat milk and insert a human gene that codes for a naturally occurring protein. When the animal reaches maturity and begins producing milk, every cup of the white stuff contains large quantities of the therapeutic protein, which can be chemically extracted in pure form. “The mammary gland is nature’s way of making proteins that are nutritious for offspring,” Newberry says. “All we’re doing is placing extra DNA coding in this natural pathway.”

Before transgenic breeding, pharmaceutical companies normally extracted such protein compounds from donated blood plasma. But to get the same kilogram of antithrombin that a single transgenic goat produces each year, you’d have to get 50,000 people to donate blood — a time-consuming process with its own inherent risks. “It’s so bloody expensive, excuse the pun,” Newberry says, “and the Red Cross just got hit with another set of fines for insufficient screening. Now, would you rather have a drug derived from human blood donors, or from our goats, given that we know where they slept last night?”

That question ignores a key fact. “Using goats for drug production has unpredictable effects, and the genetic inheritance of the modified genes is not a given — 90 to 99 percent of the animals bred are killed immediately because they don’t incorporate the desired gene,” says Jessica Sandler, director of the regulatory testing division at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Creating transgenic animals does indeed have a high failure rate. With the technique known as pronuclear injection, only about one to 10 of every 100 attempts results in transgenic offspring, producing a high number of animals typically earmarked for euthanasia. The more sophisticated nuclear-transfer method that GTC uses ensures that virtually 100 percent of viable offspring are transgenic. Still, the transgene does not always land in the targeted section of the genome, and some offspring end up with severe birth defects for reasons that are still not well understood.

Tom Regan, a philosophy professor emeritus at North Carolina State University and author of “Empty Cages,” sees the death and suffering of defective animals as a grave ethical misstep. “The animals used for these purposes are in fundamental ways like us — their behavior tells us they’re like us, evolutionary theory tells us they’re like us,” he says. “What we have with transgenic research is another incentive for reducing animals to something whose purpose for being in the world is to serve human interests. And that’s fundamentally flawed.”

Others contend that raising animals to produce drugs is no crueler than raising them for agricultural purposes. “I’ve been involved in this for a long time, and the animals we have are positively spoiled,” says dairy scientist Robert Bremel, founder of transgenics company ioGenetics. “If the drug product is innocuous to the animals themselves, they do fine.”

Debates over animals’ welfare and self-determination aside, there’s the question of whether transgenic animals will produce drugs that create unexpected side effects in humans. “We have to be careful about the activation of retroviral or pathogenic agents,” says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ food and environment program, adding that human drug products derived from animals could potentially pass on such pathogens to recipients.

Spurred by similar worries, the National Academy of Sciences’ research council formed a committee to assess the safety of animal biotechnology products. “The mere fact that something is produced by a genetically altered animal does not make it harmful,” says John Vandenbergh, a biologist who chaired the committee. “But there was concern that some of these new proteins could induce allergic reactions in people.” The report the committee issued in 2002 recommended controls to keep transgenic animal products out of the food supply. (GTC adheres strictly to such standards, Newberry says: “We don’t sell our milk, and we give our dead goats to a licensed contractor that incinerates them.”)

To be sure, squeamishness about human-animal hybrids has a storied pedigree: Geryon of Dante’s “Inferno,” who dwells in the lowest circles of hell, is a fearsome crossbreed with a human face and a scaly tail. But is equating chimerism with fallen virtue still justified? What rules should govern foisting part of the genetic code that makes us human — no matter how small — onto chickens, goats and rabbits?

“With chimeras, we are challenging our concepts of what it means to be ‘human,'” bioethicist Linda MacDonald Glenn, a former ethics fellow at the American Medical Association, said in a 2003 speech. “We need to be prepared to ask, ‘How can we preserve our human rights and dignity despite the fact that our “humanness” may no longer be the exclusive possession of Homo sapiens?'”

Today, Glenn still struggles with questions about what “humanness” signifies. “If you say, ‘Humans are the ones who can reason,’ what happens when you have a child who’s born with mental deficiencies?” she says. “It’s insulting to say that child’s not a person. On the other hand, there are also animals that have high cognitive abilities.” The lack of a clear-cut distinction between humans and animals, Glenn says, makes it difficult to justify the process of drastically modifying animal genomes, though she feels some genetic alterations may be appropriate if they stand to improve human health and well-being significantly. “We are all interconnected. It’s important that we treat the goats with respect, because they’re really not that far away from us.”

In Newberry’s view, this kind of deep-waters philosophy is unwarranted. He scoffs at the implication that GTC’s operations are even in the Dr. Moreau ballpark. “People say, ‘Are they breeding centaurs out there, some kind of man-goat beast?’ No, of course not. We put a control sequence in the transgene to make sure it’s only turned on during lactation. And there’s a big difference between manipulating a single gene, like we’re doing, and manipulating a whole chromosome. Treating them the same is like saying, ‘I moved my brother-in-law into his new apartment with a pickup truck. Now I’m going to move all of New York City with that same truck.'”

Despite the deeply ingrained public perception that, darn it, there’s something just not right about this kettle of fish, companies like GTC may succeed if they can make a lights-out case for the medical necessity of their products. After all, even conservative grande dame Nancy Reagan became a stem-cell research crusader once she realized the treatment was the best hope to reverse her late husband’s Alzheimer’s.

“The bottom line is that people do these trade-off calculations,” says Edna Einsiedel, a communications professor at the University of Calgary. The World Organization for Animal Health commissioned her to write a 2005 survey report assessing the tenor of public opinion regarding transgenic animals. “There seems to be a hierarchy in terms of preferences — people view medical-related applications more positively than food-related ones. But there’s still some discomfort with the idea that you’re taking genes from one species and putting them into another. People ask things like, ‘What kind of animal will you end up with?'” At the same, Einsiedel continues, “Sometimes when you explain things to people in greater depth, their initial reluctance can change.”

Naturally, Newberry is at the ready with examples illustrating how transgenic drugs can transform patients’ lives. If hemophiliacs had an unrestricted supply of factor-7 protein — a drug that currently costs more than $1,000 a milligram — courtesy of his goats’ mammary glands, the drug “could be used as a prophylactic, not just a rescue therapy,” he says. This development, he adds, could markedly improve sufferers’ prospects, as they’d no longer have to endure the pinpoint bleeds that cause debilitating joint damage over time.

In reality, though, transgenic drug development simply isn’t far enough along for the public to perceive it as a medical grand slam. Being able to treat clotting disorders more cheaply and effectively is great, but whether transgenic medicines will ever vanquish intractable tumors or keep drug-resistant tuberculosis in check is still an open question.

Still, extrapolation — warranted or not — is one of the things visionary firms do best, and GTC is no exception. The company’s current full-tilt focus is on shepherding ATryn through the FDA approval process. When Newberry looks ahead, he likes to picture the day when GTC’s goat herd will become the pharmaceutical equivalent of a soft-drink machine, dispensing a vast array of life-giving substances on command.

“You can make hundreds of different proteins this way, and the system is linearly scalable: If you need more, you breed more,” he says. “This is like ‘Back to the Future.’ It’s Buck Rogers combined with farming, the oldest trade known to man.”

Source. / salon.com

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The Insurance Crisis : A Rag Blogger discussion

Posted on June 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Discussion Updated June 14, 2008

The following provocative article about our health insurance crisis was brought to our attention by Roger Baker. It has stimulated a spirited discussion among Rag Bloggers whose comments and personal experiences follow this article.

Please add yours using the “Comments” feature at the end of the post.

Thorne Dreyer

Ranks of underinsured U.S. adults increase 60 per cent
By Victoria Colliver / June 10, 2008

The number of adults nationwide who have health insurance but face financial risk due to high out-of-pocket expenses – known as the underinsured – increased 60 percent between 2003 and 2007 to more than 25 million, a study released today found.

Middle- and higher-income families, those with annual incomes of at least $40,000, experienced the sharpest increase among the uninsured, nearly tripling from 4 percent in 2003 to 11 percent in 2007, according to the study by the Commonwealth Fund, which was published online in the journal Health Affairs.

While an estimated 47 million Americans have no insurance at all, health experts say people who are required to pay high deductibles and co-payments for limited benefits often go without care due to costs.

“Lack of insurance is only one part of the problem as even the insured have serious gaps in coverage,” said Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private fund that supports independent health research. “Insurance coverage is the ticket into the health care system but, for too many, that ticket does not provide genuine access to care.”

The study based its data on a survey of about 3,500 adults conducted from June to October 2007. About three quarters of the respondents were between the ages of 19 and 64 years old, meaning most were working adults who were not yet eligible for the federal Medicare program.

Those defined as underinsured had health insurance all year but had out-of-pocket medical expenses of at least 10 percent of their income, or 5 percent for those with low incomes.

The report’s authors said people with individual or small-group coverage, typically those who worked for a small business or were self-employed, were more likely to have insurance that required substantial cost sharing than those with coverage through large employers.

Forty-five percent of the underinsured reported difficulties paying their medical bills, being contacted by collection agencies for unpaid bills or changing their way of life to cover their health expenses.

“Here in the United States, you can have health insurance all year long and still go into medical debt or face bankruptcy,” said Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund and lead author of the report.

A 61-year-old San Mateo County woman, who declined to be identified out of fear that she could lose her policy, said she’s incurred $35,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses in the last six years despite never having a gap in health insurance.

“I’ve put stuff on credit cards up to my elbow,” she said. She and her husband changed their lifestyle to afford their share of medical costs, but have not had to file for bankruptcy.

Some of her uncovered expenses include $5,000 for her share of three MRIs conducted in January 2007 for a back injury and a recent $1,750 bill for three injections that were not covered by her Anthem Blue Cross small-group business policy. The policy costs $1,000 a month for her and her husband along with a $5,000 annual deductible.

“The rates keep going up, but they keep cutting services,” she said, noting that she still feels fortunate to have health insurance.

To read the report, go to commonwealthfund.org or healthaffairs.org.

Insured, but vulnerable

A study released today by the Commonwealth Fund found that people who had health insurance all year but were required to pay high out-of-pocket expenses experienced some of the same problems as those with no health insurance at all. According to the study:

*About 68 percent of the uninsured and 53 percent of the underinsured said they went without needed care because of cost, compared with 31 percent of those with adequate insurance.

*Nearly half – 45 percent – of the underinsured reported financial stress due to medical bills. About 51 percent of the uninsured and 21 percent of those with better coverage said they experienced similar financial difficulties.

Source: Commonwealth Fund

Source. / SF Gate


Comments from Rag Bloggers:

So, 47 million + 25 million = 72 million
divided by about 266 million who are under 65, and we get 27% of Americans under 65 are either uninsured or underinsured.

Scott Trimble

…and I’m one of them. I have asthma, it’s considered life-threatening enough to get insurance denied on my behalf. The only “offer” I have had as an adult was from a company that was willing to insure me as long as asthma and other respiratory illnesses were not covered.

My former landlady had breast cancer, and she too has been denied insurance–unless she signs a form allowing them to exclude any related cancer (and what all would those be? Anything?) from her policy.

This is obviously all upside down. It would be like an auto insurance firm saying they would cover you, as long as you didn’t have an accident. Why have we allowed the insurance companies in this country to operate in this way?

Alyssa Burgin

We have been among those underinsured. Here’s the greatly shortened version of our personal story (with a built in cautionary tale):

My wife Annie and I have had health insurance on and off ever since we grew up (some time in our 30s). In 1990, I had cancer. I had insurance at the time and it wasn’t an awful policy. Nevertheless, I had to fight them over most of the bills I was getting. They tried to deny benefits at every turn.

Fortunately, despite being sick and tired most of the time from chemo, surgery, etc., I was able to muster up the energy to do battle with the benefit deniers, sometimes having to escalate the battle to the company’s supervisory level. I fought and, for the most part won. Being young and basically strong helped, but being a tenacious, pushy NY Jew didn’t hurt either. I wondered at the time (and still wonder) what happens to people who are old or weak or just too sick to engage in arguments over every bill. I suspect that they just give up and get screwed out of the benefits that are their due.

After that, the insurance company started jacking up my rates every six months. There was nothing I could do because no other insurance company would take me having had cancer recently. So I paid the rates and paid and paid until my nose hurt. See, here in Texas they cannot raise one person’s rates. They can only raise the rates of all members of a “class”. So they raise the rates and those who can switch to a new policy or a new company to get a better rate do switch. They did that until the only members of my “class” left were those too sick or uninsurable to switch. Five years later, I was considered thoroughly in remission and I was able to get a policy with another company at better rates. I went with that company until their rates got too high and then I switched again, this time to Unicare (I call them un-care). Their rates were ok at first but then they started to soar at every renewal. To keep the rates manageable I kept raising the deductible until it got to $5,000 (the highest they went).

So, a couple of years ago I started shopping around again. I would find what seemed like a decent policy at a decent rate, send in my application with my $25 (or so) application fee, and later (often much later) find out that I had been denied. Seems that old cancer had become a problem for these companies even though I was now over 15 years in remission. I tried four different companies and was denied by all. Annie also had a few things in her medical history that made her less than the most desirable candidate for insurance.

Meanwhile, since Unicare didn’t cover much (they covered no prevention) and we had that $5,000 deductible anyway and we were shooting our wad on the insurance itself (about $11,000 a year for the 2 of us), we held back on going to the doctor. Annie, partially out of fear of becoming even more uninsurable, put off her mammogram for 3 years. ACC, where Annie teaches, started allowing adjunct professors to pay their own way and get into their group insurance so last year we finally left Unicare and switched to he ACC group policy. It took a while because we had to wait for the right time of year to sign up and then weren’t actually covered until some months later but we are now on that BC/BS plan.

Some time after we were covered, Annie got a mammogram and found out that she had stage 2 breast cancer. She is now in treatment and we feel like part idiot, part victim for having put off that exam. If done sooner, the lump would have no doubt been detected when it was a lot smaller and more easily treatable.

Again, what do the uninsured do? I guess they skip things like mammograms altogether. And the same might go for the underinsured like us. Anyway,the cautionary part of all this is, whatever the price, get it together and get those exams every year. Do it cursing the system all the way but do it. Then get out and raise your voices in support of a real, egalitarian, comprehensive single-payer system. It’s the least a civilized society should provide its citizens.

Ric Sternberg

I think, if the federal government doesn’t come through with universal single-payer care soon, we should form a nationwide healthcare co-op, a nonprofit group to insure everyone. According to Conyers’ numbers (from his website on HR 676), it would cost us about 15% of our paychecks, but my current policy costs almost that much now, and I still have to cover co-pays and deductibles. Personally, I wouldn’t even begin to know how to organize such a beast, but it must be possible, and we can’t wait forever.

Scott Trimble

Single payer will go a long ways, but we ought to pay a bit of attention to our public health officials as well.

Drugs are not the answer to health. Or certainly not the only one.

Public health officials say that as long as we have the enormous subsidies for junk food, and no subsidies for real food, that it will be impossible to achieve adequate health care for our people.

Real food keeps getting more expensive, junk food is cheap.

Back in the seventies, grass fed beef was cheaper than corn fed!! But thanks to the enormous subsidies for feed corn and soy, pastures are getting converted to corn.

Please check out Public Health Action on the farm bill.

Janet Gilles

I don’t think we’re just talking about “drugs”–I don’t take any drugs at all for asthma or for anything else. I’m talking about what Ric was talking about–putting off necessary care, exams, etc., to prevent catastrophic illness or at least catch it when it is in the nascent stages. I don’t get mammograms because there’s really no point to it. If they did find something, I would just have to die of it, because there’s no way I could afford to treat it. I can’t be the only person out there who is doing this, there are legions.

No amount of eating grass-fed beef is going to help me or anyone like me. In fact, I don’t eat beef and haven’t done so in 28 years. People need the ability to get routine medical care–not drugs, necessarily—routine medical care, in the hopes that they don’t come down with catastrophic, fatal illnesses.

Alyssa Burgin

Yes, but okay,

What if ninety percent of catastrophic illness could be prevented by eating a healthy diet in the first place?

Prevention is preventing something, not diagnosing it early after you get it.

Does it make sense to subsidize an unhealthy diet?

That is what we do, the farm subsidies only go to junk food, none to real food.

The public health authorities say we can never solve the problem of health as long as we subsidize junk food, so that people on a budget are forced to buy unhealthy food because good food is too expensive.

Janet Gilles

No beef, regardless of what it was fed before being ruthlessly slaughtered, is food. It’s not good food. It’s not junk food. It is poison, full of the death that brought it to the plate.

And I would like to reiterate Alyssa’s point: none of us were talking about drugs, although it is true that the modern medical industry has come to be heavily reliant upon them. But moving to a universal single-payer system should begin to counter that, as the drug companies will no longer have the ability to influence doctors that they now do.

However, Janet’s point is also valid, even if the example is not. A large part of our declining health can be attributed to the SAD (Standard American Diet) which is composed far too much of animal proteins from meats and dairy, along with all the saturated fats that go along with them, as well as white flour, white sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other processed foods. A vegan diet high in whole grains, fiber, vegetable proteins, and low in unsaturated fats, but with some care taken to assure a proper balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids…is key to good health.

Nevertheless, things like broken bones and other injuries have considerably less to do with diet, and do require medical care. And preventative and diagnostic measures are also quite important to long term health, but as Alyssa points out we need to be able to have confidence that we will be able to address a problem if it is discovered. Again, for many, if not most of us, that will require universal single-payer….

Scott Trimble

The problem is progressives are always demanding medical care, but ignoring the reason for our poor health.

Half the calories or more in the American diet are white bread, high fructose corn syrup, deep fat fried (corn and soy oil) and other completely empty calories, all government subsidized by the Farm Bill.

We would have been demanding medical care for all the sailors with scurvy, when what they needed was limes or cabbages.

The government pays huge sums of money to provide junk food, (commodities in government speak). Driving the farmers who actually grow real food off the land.

Doctors don’t study nutrition, public health officials do. And that is the problem, empty nutrients provided at government expense.

Janet Gilles

This is not an either/or situation. As the MDS founding principles state:

“. . . we advocate: the restoration and preservation of the earth’s robust ecological health; the extension of human rights to include universal healthcare, decent housing, lifelong education, fortifying nutrition, reproductive freedom, meaningful work and the right to organize, bargain, and petition collectively to impartial arbitrators; Universal healthcare and fortifying nutrition and the restoration of the earth’s robust ecological health.”

That pretty much cuts out vast herds of cattle raised to be eaten after being fattened with corn. They are also the worst sources of methane gas which is damaging the ozone layer.

David Hamilton

For example, many problems are caused by lack of bone density, considered inevitable with the aging process, yet scientific studies consistently show that bone density will increase with aging, giving sufficient nutrients in the diet.

You cannot get this information from your doctor, as they do not study nutrition.

A system that simply pays for drugs and doctors and hospitals is doomed to failure.

Janet Gilles

Right! Several issues: Improve nutrition, protect the earth, provide health care! Where’s the argument? And for those who would blame the patient for somehow doing something wrong nutritionally, causing or contributing to their illness, I say HUH?

When I got cancer I was a vegetarian and ate organic food as much as possible (even grew some myself). I exercised regularly and, except for working too hard lived a healthy lifestyle. I had large cell, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a 22cm tumor). That was the same type of cancer that was so prevalent among Iowa corn farmers (a 30% higher incidence than the general population at that time). Their cancer was very likely caused by a certain herbicide which happens to be a kissin’ cousin of paraquat. I never came into contact with an Iowa corn field but I sure as hell came into intimate contact with a certain Mexican crop. In my earlier days I was poor and could not bring myself to throw out anything, particularly my favorite substance, tainted and off-smelling though it might have been. That’s what I think caused my cancer – the US government and their misguided (lunatic) eradication program combined with my own youthful feeling of immortality which led me to take chances.

Bottom line though, was when I got sick I was willing to do anything to get well. Who cared what the cause was? The lousy, greedy, ill-informed, pill-pushing medical establishment was one place I turned. I also did nutritional, herbal, homeopathic, stinky Chinese teas, affirmations, etc. In the end, who knows what worked. But I would not have wanted to forgo the chemo. And that’s where we began this discussion – we need good insurance so everyone can have all possible cures available to them.

Ric Sternberg

Yeah, I get a little sick of the blame-the-victim mentality that I often see when health care is discussed. That has no place in this discussion or any other, frankly, and when one starts talking about nutrition, or pollution, or any of these things, it starts to look like we’re saying that if you get sick, you deserve it. Well, all I did to get asthma was CHOOSE THE WRONG PARENTS.

Of course we all want organic foods and a halt to deadly pesticides, healthy diets, and great nutrition. But that is not what I’m talking about right now. I’m talking about health care. Is it a right or is it not? Why do other industrialized nations have it and we don’t? And why the hell do our pharmaceutical companies and our mega-monolithic-over-merged healthcare companies bulge at the seams of their profits, stuffing cash in their pants as they go–?

We need good insurance, as Ric says, so that we can all take preventative measures, we can all have prophylactic health care, and we can all live our lives as we intend them.

Alyssa Burgin

Paul Krugman spoke on the UT campus awhile back, and said that France has the best health care system in the industrialized world.

Coincidentally, they subsidize their small farmers and their local agriculture.
You can’t have one without…

…The other.

Janet Gilles

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Supremes : Guantanamo Detainees DO Have Rights

Posted on June 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Camp Delta detention compound at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Top US court deals Bush blow
on Guantanamo rights
June 12, 2008

WASHINGTON — The US Supreme Court Thursday ruled Guantanamo prisoners have the right to challenge their detention at the US military base in civilian courts, dealing a stiff rebuke to the Bush administration.

“The laws and constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” the court said in its historic ruling, for the third time in four years striking down the government’s case for trying “war on terror” suspects in military tribunals.

“Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law,” the court added, ruling that prisoners in the remote US jail in southern Cuba “have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus.”

By a vote of five to four, the court found that even if the base was officially on Cuban territory, it was in fact operating as if it were on American soil.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the administration was “reviewing the opinion” but declined immediate comment.

Thursday’s ruling should now give the prisoners and their legal teams the right under the constitution to demand to know on what basis they are being held.

So far the administration of President George W. Bush has refused to unveil the body of evidence to justify the prisoners’ continued detention, arguing it would be against the interests of national security.

Detainees have long protested that they had been mistreated, and have questioned the very legality of the Guantanamo military tribunals, which the administration has said will try the cases of 80 prisoners instead of civilian courts.

The Supreme Court took up the issue of Guantanamo inmates in 2004 and again in 2006, ruling both times that detainees had a statutory — legal but not constitutional — right to contest their indefinite detention before an independent judge, a legal process known as habeas corpus.

But, urged by the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 passed new legislation that forbade them from seeking justice in a federal court until they are judged by a special military tribunal.

It was not immediately clear how Thursday’s ruling would affect those 270 detainees still held in the jail.

Australian David Hicks is the only “war on terror” detainee to have so far been sentenced at Guantanamo after pleading guilty in a deal with US authorities which allowed him to serve out the remaining nine months of his sentence at home.

The most important trial of five alleged suspects in the September 11, 2001 attacks is not due to get fully underway until the summer, after they were read the charges against them at a hearing last week.

The first detainee who could be affected is Yemeni Salim Hamdan, accused of being the driver and personal bodyguard of the leader of the Al-Qaeda terror network, Osama bin Laden.

An initial appeal by Hamdan led to the 2006 Supreme Court decision, and his lawyers have already filed an appeal to a Washington court which was awaiting the Supreme Court decision before taking up the case.

Since the camp was opened in January 2002 to deal with the suspects rounded up in the US “war on terror” it has under gone major changes.

Two-thirds of the 800 prisoners who have passed through its barbed-wire gates have been freed, mostly without charge, after several years in captivity.

But the remaining prisoners are often held in solitary confinement, allowed little contact with their families and the outside world, and have no certainty about their fate.

Four detainees have committed suicide, and hunger strikes are frequent, leading to the force feeding of prisoners by their military guards.

The initial open air cages, which triggered a storm of international criticism, have long been emptied and today have returned to grass and the native iguanas.

And most of the prisoners, even those which the US authorities have said could be freed, are now housed in modern cells modelled on those in US high-security jails.

Both candidates to succeed Bush in the November elections, Republican John McCain and his Democratic rival Barack Obama have said they will close the prison.

The White House has also repeatedly said it would shut Guantanamo down, but has failed so far to come with an alternative, or to find countries willing to take some prisoners, such as Muslim Uighurs from northwest China, who face repression at home.

Source. / AFP

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New Record : 7.2 Million in Criminal Justice System

Posted on June 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

And the chicks are coming home to roost.

The number of women in prison “rose faster in 2006 than over the previous five years,” mostly in Hawaii, North Dakota, Wyoming and Oklahoma, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report said.

Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

Nation’s Justice System Strains
to Keep Pace With Convictions
By Darryl Fears / June 12, 2008

The number of people under supervision in the nation’s criminal justice system rose to 7.2 million in 2006, the highest ever, costing states tens of billions of dollars to house and monitor offenders as they go in and out of jails and prisons.

According to a recently released report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2 million offenders were either in jail or prison in 2006, the most recent year studied in an annual survey. Another 4.2 million were on probation, and nearly 800,000 were on parole.

The cost to taxpayers, about $45 billion, is causing states such as California to reconsider harsh criminal penalties. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, California is now exporting some of its 170,000 inmates to privately run corrections facilities as far away as Tennessee.

“There are a number of states that have talked about an early release of prisoners deemed non-threatening,” said Rebecca Blank, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. “The problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You’re paying a lot of money here. You have to ask if some of these high mandatory minimum sentences make sense.”

The bureau’s report comes on the heels of a Pew Center on the States report showing 1 percent of U.S. adults behind bars, a historic high. The United States has the largest number of people behind bars in the world, according to the Pew report.

Black men, about one in 15, were most affected, and Hispanics, one in 35, were well represented among offenders. The number of women in prison “rose faster in 2006 than over the previous five years,” mostly in Hawaii, North Dakota, Wyoming and Oklahoma, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report said.

In 1980, about the time that tough sentencing laws, particularly for drug offenses, began to be passed by federal and state legislators, 1.8 million people were in the system and $11 billion was spent on corrections.

“It’s really like a runaway train,” said Ryan King, policy analyst for the liberal Sentencing Project. “Nobody’s taking a step back and asking where all these billions of dollars are going.” With so much overcrowding, King said, states “need billions of dollars to build enough beds to catch up to where they need to be.”

Defenders of the system argue, however, that the rise in the prison population means that more dangerous criminals have been taken off the streets.

“If you look at the fact that these are people who are committing a crime, creating a danger to the public, you can’t look at it as wrong,” said Scott Thorpe, chief executive of the California District Attorneys Association. “What is the appropriate number of people to be incarcerated to ensure public safety? I don’t know if you can answer that.”

State contracts with private prisons to house offenders grew by 6 percent, or about 6,000 inmates, the report said. Nearly 114,000 state and federal prisoners were in private institutions in 2006.

Tim Lynch, director of the criminal justice project for the libertarian Cato Institute, called the numbers “scandalous” and said states have resorted to “tinkering” to solve prison overcrowding.

“I think these numbers demonstrate that we’ve lost our way,” Lynch said. “We’ve lost our way when our laws require such a massive scale of incarceration.”

Lynch and others said the drug war is destroying American inner cities almost as much as the drug trade. “When you lock up a bank robber, a child molester or a mugger, you’re removing a career offender from the street.

“When you lock up a drug dealer, he is immediately replaced,” Lynch said. “We tried this with alcohol during Prohibition and it didn’t work. We’re not reaching the same conclusion with the drug war. It’s slowly sinking in, but it will take politicians some time to turn this around.”

Source. / Washington Post

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Hey, It’s Only Money. Yours.

Posted on June 12, 2008 by RagBlog


Blame Rising Oil Prices on Bush
by Robert Scheer / June 10, 2008

Wow, a lot of people must have bought Hummers last week. How else to explain the spike in oil prices? No, I’m not being silly: They are, and by they I mean the gaggle of media pundits and other administration apologists — abetted by some green zealots — who want to explain our energy crisis by reference to profligate consumers.

Sure, in the long run we consumers, particularly the most wasteful ones who happen to reside in the good old USA, and who have become accustomed to consuming many times our population’s worth of the world’s resources, do need to shape up. But that has little to do with the fivefold rise in the price of oil since George Bush became our president. Yep, he did it; Bush’s deliberate roiling of world politics is the key variable in the run-up of oil prices. No president has been more brilliant in destabilizing the politics of oil-producing countries from Venezuela to Russia and on to the key oil lakes of Iraq and Iran.

This last will go down in our nation’s history as one of the dumbest escapades ever, rivaling even the madness of the Vietnam War. But this time the neoconservatives bet their smart money on oil as the decisive missing ingredient for success. Vietnam was always absurd on its face as an imperial adventure because, as American consumers who check their labels must know, the Vietnamese dominate the market only in the provision of farmed shrimp.

I won’t bother here to dignify the canard that Vietnam, any more than Iraq, ever represented a serious threat to U.S. security, John McCain’s sacrifice in the former war and his apologetics for the current one notwithstanding. After the most ignominious defeat in American history, Communist Vietnam did not have to be fought on the shores of San Diego, as the hawks at that time predicted, but rather went to war with Communist China, the country that had occupied Vietnam for a thousand years. The Vietnamese later made their peace and now compete successfully in the capitalist marketplace without controlling anyone else’s resources.

Something similarly unexpected is likely to occur if we get out of Iraq and permit the people of that region to make their own history. Events upon our departure will follow the vagaries of a historical script centering on religion, ethnicity and nationalism, which the talking heads in media and political circles are united in ignoring. As Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demonstrated the other day with his third visit to his former safe haven in Iran, the politics of the region have already been sorted out in ways unpredicted by the neocons.

One need only note the words of advice extended to Maliki by Iran’s “supreme leader,” the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, that the Iraqis must “think of a solution” to free themselves from the U.S. military. Maliki nodded, ever grateful for an audience with the man who holds Iraq’s destiny in his hand, thanks to the Americans’ overthrow of Tehran’s nemesis, Saddam Hussein. As I said, Bush was brilliant.

But to be fair, the administration did finally get something right last week when Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the civilian and military chiefs of the Air Force. They were being punished in part for being in charge of an Air Force defense system that lost track of a nuclear-loaded B-52 that flew over the U.S. without anyone in the chain of command aware of its dangerous cargo. Then there was also the matter of ballistic-missile fuses that were erroneously shipped to Taiwan.

The Air Force has been particularly egregious in exploiting the hysteria over 9/11 to commit to hundreds of billions in future spending for high-tech weapons that make no sense with the collapse of the Soviet Union. One issue in the firings was the Air Force’s pushing for hundreds more F-22 fighter jets, a $65-billion program that Gates had concluded was not needed as there has been no role for the existing force in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Gates rejected the argument that China, or any other nation, was on the way to providing the F-22 with a worthy opponent. Given his sudden commitment to logic, Gates may not survive long even in this lame-duck administration.

Better get someone in there fast who is content that we taxpayers pay the interest on the loans from China to pay for building up an arsenal to counter weapons that the Chinese show no sign of building. Hey, it’s only money. Yours.

[Robert Scheer is the author, most recently, of “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” to be published this week by Twelve Books.]

Copyright © 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Source / TruthDig

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A Country of Vast Designs and Expectations

Posted on June 12, 2008 by RagBlog

Our Friend Betsy Gaines, who sent this article to me, remarked, “I love this article. I am an optimist.” Perhaps I am less so, but I want to be. Just last night, I shared something I have come to believe about living a human life: “Leave your expectations behind, and let your hopes guide your choices.” I do not know if it is sound advice, but I have watched my own expectations dash my reality more than once in events so painful I still cannot face them in conversation without becoming emotional. Maybe it is different when we let ourselves expect things of our nation. My experiences speak only to our Humanity.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Obama on the Nile
By Thomas L. Friedman / June 11, 2008

This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that’s not my problem. I cannot tell a lie: Many Egyptians and other Arab Muslims really like him and hope that he wins the presidency.

I have had a chance to observe several U.S. elections from abroad, but it has been unusually revealing to be in Egypt as Barack Hussein Obama became the Democrats’ nominee for president of the United States.

While Obama, who was raised a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father’s family was of Muslim heritage. They don’t really understand Obama’s family tree, but what they do know is that if America — despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 — were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name “Hussein,” it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.

Every interview seems to end with the person I was interviewing asking me: “Now, can I ask you a question? Obama? Do you think they will let him win?” (It’s always “let him win” not just “win.”)

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush’s invocation of a post-9/11 “crusade,” Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

Of course, Egyptians still have their grievances with America, and will in the future no matter who is president — and we’ve got a few grievances with them, too. But every once in a while, America does something so radical, so out of the ordinary — something that old, encrusted, traditional societies like those in the Middle East could simply never imagine — that it revives America’s revolutionary “brand” overseas in a way that no diplomat could have designed or planned.

I just had dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with two Egyptian officials and a businessman, and one of them quoted one of his children as asking: “Could something like this ever happen in Egypt?” And the answer from everyone at the table was, of course, “no.” It couldn’t happen anywhere in this region. Could a Copt become president of Egypt? Not a chance. Could a Shiite become the leader of Saudi Arabia? Not in a hundred years. A Bahai president of Iran? In your dreams. Here, the past always buries the future, not the other way around.

These Egyptian officials were particularly excited about Obama’s nomination because it might mean that being labeled a “pro-American” reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama’s demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in — as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam — will be much more attuned to global trends.

My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times’s bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo’s famed Blue Mosque: “Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: ‘Hillary-Obama tied?’ in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn’t have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage. ‘For me and my family and friends, we want Obama,’ he said. ‘We all like what he is saying.’ ”

Yes, all of this Obama-mania is excessive and will inevitably be punctured should he win the presidency and start making tough calls or big mistakes. For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the “idea of America” — this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.

In his history of 19th-century America, “What Hath God Wrought,” Daniel Walker Howe quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as telling a meeting of the Mercantile Library Association in 1844 that “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”

That’s the America that got swallowed by the war on terrorism. And it’s the America that many people want back. I have no idea whether Obama will win in November. Whether he does or doesn’t, though, the mere fact of his nomination has done something very important. We’ve surprised ourselves and surprised the world and, in so doing, reminded everyone that we are still a country of new beginnings.

Source / The New York Times

With Thanks to Betsy Gaines / The Rag Blog

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New Politics : Romancing the Internet

Posted on June 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Obama’s Organization, and the Future of American Politics
By Micah L. Sifry / June 8, 2008

Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton is the first time an insurgent has beaten the establishment candidate in the Democratic primaries since Jimmy Carter in 1976. This is interesting and important for all kinds of reasons. One, as I’ve written before, is that it suggests that the era of Big Money and Big Media pre-selecting the nominee of the Democratic party may well be over, in no small part because of the affordances brought by the internet: lower costs of communication and collaboration, and less allowances for hypocrisy and dishonesty in campaigns.

But there’s another big reason why Obama’s victory is so important. He is riding herd on the largest and most potent new political organization anyone has seen on the American landscape in at least sixteen years. He’s probably got anywhere from four to eight million email addresses on top of his 1.5 million donors and 800,000 registered users of my.barackobama.com, his social networking platform.

What happens with this organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? For us here at techPresident, a website that is focused on how the candidates are using the web, and the web is using them, by the time November rolls around, this could be the billion-dollar question.

This isn’t the first time this question has arisen in modern American politics, by the way. And usually the answer is “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.” It’s just that the internet should force us to think about the possibilities of a different answer. Not only that, I think Obama is thinking about a different answer.

The Movement or the Man?

In almost every presidential election, one or more of the campaigns, sometimes that of the winner, and often that of a powerful but ultimately unsuccessful insurgent, has the effect of drawing thousands or tens of thousands of new political activists into the process.

There are three campaigns that I’ve spent a lot of my life in journalism writing about: Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988; Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996; and Howard Dean in 2004. In each case, a charismatic candidate with a powerful message drew a ton of new activist energy into the process. And in each case, the movement and the man faced a moment of truth: is this about you, or the larger movement?

Jesse Jackson

If Obama wins in November, the question will loom larger for one critical reason: because his supporters have the capacity to self-organize on a scale never seen before in our lifetimes. (If you question that, go read Clay Shirky’s great new book, Here Comes Everybody.) To see what I mean by this, allow me to take you on a short history lesson.

In 1988, Jesse Jackson went to the Democratic convention in Atlanta with about a third of the delegates and enough energy to force Michael Dukakis to give him a starring moment on the stage, side-by-side with Dukakis’ far more conservative running-mate Lloyd Bentsen. At the time, there were Rainbow Coalition chapters in many states, and some activists were talking about converting those chapters into a formal ongoing structure for progressive activism inside and outside the Democratic party. This was not to be. Dukakis bought Jackson off with a campaign plane, salving the Reverend’s personal ego, and Jackson himself didn’t want the Rainbow Coalition to develop into an independent, bottom-up organization.

So while his candidacy helped seed a number of successful bids for power by African-America politicians in 1989 and 1990 (like David Dinkins’ campaign for mayor of New York City), the Jesse Jackson movement of 1988 never was allowed to become an ongoing people-powered movement from below. I’ll have to dig out my files to flesh out the picture, but you can take my word for it: Jackson only wanted to maintain a “campaign-in-waiting” organizational structure that would be totally controlled by him. He and his minions actively worked to snuff out independent Rainbow Coalition chapters in the states. And thus, for all the popular mobilization that Jesse Jackson galvanized in 1988, there was little to speak of a year or two later beyond a shell organization using the name Rainbow Coalition under Jackson’s control. It would hold meetings (like the one in 1992 where candidate Bill Clinton attacked rapper “Sista Souljah”), but the base was gone, back into the woodwork.

H. Ross Perot
Ross Was Boss

In Perot’s case, the story is even worse. After the tiny Texan got 20 million votes in the 1992 election, he called on his followers to push for his reform agenda by joining United We Stand America, promising them, “I’m Ross, You’re the Boss.” More than two million people joined UWSA in 1993, each paying annual dues of $15 a year. If you know anything about the hollowing out of civic organization (read Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone), you know that a membership organization with 2-million-plus dues-paying members is a rare beast in American politics.

But Perot, as we all know, was a control freak. His candidacy may have inspired millions of reform-minded Americans to come out of the woodwork, put their own “skin in the game” to get him on the ballot, but Ross didn’t know any other way but to be the Boss. He hired ex-military men to take over his state petition drives, and once UWSA got going, tried to impose strict controls on its volunteer state directors. I put out a little newsletter during those years called The Perot Periodical, and we reported chapter and verse on how Perot and his “white shirts” put the boot down on his grassroots. By the summer of 1995, when Perot decided to form a third party, the Reform Party, much of his grassroots movement was decimated. Again, the man won out over the movement.

It’s not insignificant, I think, that the 1988-90 snuffing of the Rainbow Coalition movement and the 1992-95 snuffing of the Perot movement both happened before the mass participation internet. Yes, there were email lists in existence, and indeed I watched the Perot movement struggle to maintain its independence from Ross’s lieutenants in part by reading the Usenet group alt.politics.perot. But not enough people were using these tools, and the tools weren’t robust enough to defeat the centralized and well-financed Dallas operation run by Perot.

Dean 2004: Networked Politics on the Rise

Fast forward to February 2004. The Howard Dean campaign has collapsed in the wake of its failure in Iowa. Joe Trippi comes to speak at the Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego, a day before the annual ETech conference. I stand up to ask Joe, “Who owns the list, Joe? What is going to happen to Dean for America?” Six hundred thousand people had come together to propel Vermont’s governor to front-runner status, and now it was all about to go away. Trippi answered that he didn’t know what would happen to the list. But he was already thinking about the possibilities, and had registered the url “changeforamerica.com” in the hopes of keeping the Dean movement going.

Well, we all know what happened afterwards. The Dean campaign list was used to spawn DemocracyforAmerica, and Howard gave the reigns to his brother Jim once he became DNC chair. DfA has kept going, with active chapters around the country, and a respectable amount of organizing and fundraising on behalf of Dean-like candidates for various levels of political office. It’s not a game changer, but it is definitely something a bit more like an ongoing, people-powered organization than either the Jackson or Perot successor groups.

So, with all this history in mind, let’s return to the billion-dollar question: What happens with the Obama organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? What is Obama thinking about 2009? And what are the tens of thousands of volunteer activists thinking? Which way will power flow?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but clues abound. Take two videos from inside the Obama campaign, one that was just posted yesterday, and one from a few months ago that got little attention.

Howard Dean at Yearly Kos convention, 2007

“Creating the best organization”

The first video shows the candidate talking to something like 300 staffers in his Chicago headquarters on Saturday, a kind of victory lap with the people who made his nomination a fact. It’s mostly a pep talk, and a window into the very youthful workforce at the core of his juggernaut. But the video also offers confirmation of something that has been becoming clearer and clearer over the last year: how much Obama, the former community organizer, has situated organizing at the heart of his campaign.

Obama starts out his pep talk noting, “When I started this campaign, I wasn’t sure I was going to be the best of candidates, but I was absolutely sure there was the possibility of creating the best organization.” He then describes his “old organizing mindset” as the idea that “when people submerge their egos for a “larger goal” they can achieve enormous things.

“Even if we had lost,” he tells the crowd,”I would be proud of what we’ve built….Collectively all of you, most of you whom are, I’m not sure, of drinking age (people laugh), you’ve created the best political organization in America, and probably the best political organization that we’ve seen in the last 30 40 years. That’s a pretty big deal.” [Emphasis added]

We don’t have a choice. Now, If we screw this up, and all those people who really need help, they not going to get help. Those of you who care about global warming, I don’t care what John McCain says, he’s not going to push that agenda hard. Those of you qho care about Darfur, I guarantee you, they’re not going to spend any political capital on that. Those of you who are concerned about education, there will be a bunch of lip service, and then more of the same. Those of you who are concerned that there’s a sense of fairness in our economy, it will be less fair. So, now everybody’s counting on you, not just me. But what a magnificent position to be in: the whole country is counting on you to change it for the better…Here you are five months away from changing the country.

And add internet-powered transparency…

While looking at the post on DailyKos by kid oakland (Paul Delehanty) that led me to this first video, I noticed another video posted by someone in the comments thread that’s even more interesting for what it tells us about Obama’s plans for his organization after the election is over.

Here’s what Obama says about his thinking: “One of the things that I’m really proud about this campaign,” he told an audience in Indianapolis on April 30, “is that we’ve built a structure that can sustain itself after the campaign.” He then talks about how he won so many states, including states like Idaho. It was because of volunteers, he says, “they built the campaign.” We didn’t originally have big plans for Idaho, he tells his listeners, “but people made this structure.”

Our database, it has a couple of million people on there, who are activated and inspired. And they know each other and they’re communicating to each other on the internet with all kinds of different groups. And we want to continue that after the election.

He then describes that as President, he envisions continuing town hall meetings where he listens to the concerns of voters as one piece of that strategy. This isn’t that new an idea, of course.

Then he adds, “I want to open up transparency in government, so that you guys know what is happening. I want to revamp our White House website. I know it’s nice to take the virtual tour of the China Room,” he notes sarcastically, “but I want people to be able to know, ‘today, this issue is going on…today’s President Obama talked about his proposal for $4000 student college tuition credits, it’s going to be going into this congressional committee, these are the key leaders in the House and Senate that are going to be deciding on the bill, here are the groups that are involved that are supporting it, you should contact your Congressman. Just creating the situation that if people want to get involved and it’s easy. The information is out there, but trying to track it down isn’t…The more we can enlist the American people to pay attention and be involved, that’s the only way we are going move an agenda forward. That’s how we are going to counteract the special interests.”

He also talks about not taking lobbyist or PAC money and passing ethics reform, but he suggests that passing his agenda in Congress is only likely if the public is paying attention. “I need you,” he tells the audience.

This video ends before Obama returns to his original comments about the structure he has built, but you can see the outlines of his logic clearly. By building the “best political organization in America,” one in which millions of people are in touch with each other online, activated and inspired, and then by putting more information out there about what the government is trying to do (and who is opposing it), Obama seems to envision working with his organization, as well as internet-powered transparency, to overcome the institutional special-interest chokehold paralyzing Washington.

Personally, I find this vision pretty breathtaking, even if we don’t know all the details yet. It is challenging my hard-earned cynicism about leaders and political movements. Will it work? And will Obama’s activists follow him wherever he leads? (When his campaign tried to weed out some of the more independent activists in his California operation earlier this spring, that boneheaded move led to an instant web-based rebellion that caused Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to reverse the decision within 24 hours.) These could be the most important questions facing what is already the most audacious and successful insurgency to arise in American electoral politics in my lifetime. I can’t wait to see what happens.

Source. / techPresident

Thanks to Duane Campbell / Progressives for Obama / The Rag Blog

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For Muslim Woman : Replace Hymen, Restore Honor

Posted on June 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Dr. Marc Abecassis carries out hymen reconstruction surgery on a 23-year-old French woman of north-African origin. Photo by Ed Alcock / NYT.

In Europe, Debate Over Islam and Virginity
By Elaine Sciolino and Souad Mekhennet / June 11, 2008

PARIS — The operation in the private clinic off the Champs-Élysées involved one semicircular cut, 10 dissolving stitches and a discounted fee of $2,900.

But for the patient, a 23-year-old French student of Moroccan descent from Montpellier, the 30-minute procedure represented the key to a new life: the illusion of virginity.

Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a hymenoplasty, a restoration of her hymen, the vaginal membrane that normally breaks in the first act of intercourse.

“In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt,” said the student, perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery on Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.”

As Europe’s Muslim population grows, many young Muslim women are caught between the freedoms that European society affords and the deep-rooted traditions of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

Gynecologists say that in the past few years, more Muslim women are seeking certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

“If you’re a Muslim woman growing up in more open societies in Europe, you can easily end up having sex before marriage,” said Dr. Hicham Mouallem, who is based in London and performs the operation. “So if you’re looking to marry a Muslim and don’t want to have problems, you’ll try to recapture your virginity.”

No reliable statistics are available, because the procedure is mostly done in private clinics and in most cases not covered by tax-financed insurance plans.

But hymen repair is talked about so much that it is the subject of a film comedy that opens in Italy this week. “Women’s Hearts,” as the film’s title is translated in English, tells the story of a Moroccan-born woman living in Italy who goes to Casablanca for the operation.

One character jokes that she wants to bring her odometer count back down to “zero.”

“We realized that what we thought was a sporadic practice was actually pretty common,” said Davide Sordella, the film’s director. “These women can live in Italy, adopt our mentality and wear jeans. But in the moments that matter, they don’t always have the strength to go against their culture.”

The issue has been particularly charged in France, where a renewed and fierce debate has occurred about a prejudice that was supposed to have been buried with the country’s sexual revolution 40 years ago: the importance of a woman’s virginity.

The furor followed the revelation two weeks ago that a court in Lille, in northern France, had annulled the 2006 marriage of two French Muslims because the groom found his bride was not the virgin she had claimed to be.

The domestic drama has gripped France. The groom, an unidentified engineer in his 30s, left the nuptial bed and announced to the still partying wedding guests that his bride had lied. She was delivered that night to her parents’ doorstep.

The next day, he approached a lawyer about annulling the marriage. The bride, then a nursing student in her 20s, confessed and agreed to an annulment.

The court ruling did not mention religion. Rather, it cited breach of contract, concluding that the engineer had married her after “she was presented to him as single and chaste.” In secular, republican France, the case touches on several delicate subjects: the intrusion of religion into daily life; the grounds for dissolution of a marriage; and the equality of the sexes.

There were calls in Parliament this week for the resignation of Rachida Dati, France’s justice minister, after she initially upheld the ruling. Ms. Dati, who is a Muslim, backed down and ordered an appeal.

Some feminists, lawyers and doctors warned that the court’s acceptance of the centrality of virginity in marriage would encourage more Frenchwomen from Arab and African Muslim backgrounds to have their hymens restored. But there is much debate about whether the procedure is an act of liberation or repression.

“The judgment was a betrayal of France’s Muslim women,” said Elisabeth Badinter, the feminist writer. “It sends these women a message of despair by saying that virginity is important in the eyes of the law. More women are going to say to themselves, ‘My God, I’m not going to take that risk. I’ll recreate my virginity.’ ”

The plight of the rejected bride persuaded the Montpellier student to have the operation.

She insisted that she had never had intercourse and only discovered her hymen was torn when she tried to obtain a certificate of virginity to present to her boyfriend and his family. She says she bled after an accident on a horse when she was 10.

The trauma from realizing that she could not prove her virginity was so intense, she said, that she quietly borrowed money to pay for the procedure.

“All of a sudden, virginity is important in France,” she said. “I realized that I could be seen like that woman everyone is talking about on television.”

Those who perform the procedure say they are empowering patients by giving them a viable future and preventing them from being abused — or even killed — by their fathers or brothers.

“Who am I to judge?” asked Dr. Marc Abecassis, who restored the Montpellier student’s hymen. “I have colleagues in the United States whose patients do this as a Valentine’s present to their husbands. What I do is different. This is not for amusement. My patients don’t have a choice if they want to find serenity — and husbands.”

A specialist in what he calls “intimate” surgery, including penile enhancement, Dr. Abecassis says he performs two to four hymen restorations per week.

The French College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians opposes the procedure on moral, cultural and health grounds.

“We had a revolution in France to win equality; we had a sexual revolution in 1968 when women fought for contraception and abortion,” said Dr. Jacques Lansac, the group’s leader. “Attaching so much importance to the hymen is regression, submission to the intolerance of the past.”

But the stories of the women who have had the surgery convey the complexity and raw emotion behind their decisions.

One Muslim born in Macedonia said she opted for the operation to avoid being punished by her father after an eight-year relationship with her boyfriend.

“I was afraid that my father would take me to a doctor and see whether I was still a virgin,” said the woman, 32, who owns a small business and lives on her own in Frankfurt. “He told me, ‘I will forgive everything but not if you have thrown dirt on my honor.’ I wasn’t afraid he would kill me, but I was sure he would have beaten me.”

In other cases, the woman and her partner decide for her to have the operation. A 26-year-old French woman of Moroccan descent said she lost her virginity four years ago when she fell in love with the man she now plans to marry. But she and her fiancé decided to share the cost of her $3,400 operation in Paris.

She said his conservative extended family in Morocco was requiring that a gynecologist — and family friend — there examine her for proof of virginity before the wedding.

“It doesn’t matter for my fiancé that I am not a virgin — but it would pose a huge problem for his family,” she said. “They know that you can pour blood on the sheets on the wedding night, so I have to have better proof.”

The lives of the French couple whose marriage was annulled are on hold. The Justice Ministry has sought an appeal, arguing that the decision has “provoked a heated social debate” that “touched all citizens of our country and especially women.”

At the Islamic Center of Roubaix, the Lille suburb where the wedding took place, there is sympathy for the woman.

“The man is the biggest of all the donkeys,” said Abdelkibir Errami, the center’s vice president. “Even if the woman was no longer a virgin, he had no right to expose her honor. This is not what Islam teaches. It teaches forgiveness.”

[Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Paris, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.]

Source. / New York Times

Thanks to Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog

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