You didn’t really want to know about U.S. torture, anyway!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Thank God our betters are protecting us!

It emerges from the USA that 9,000 documents proving direct involvement of the White House in cases of brutal torture are being withheld from the Senate Committee by the Obama administration. This should surprise nobody, as Obama has done everything in his power to protect George W Bush and the many in the administration, diplomatic service and CIA involved in the whole secret web of torture and murder. The entire programme was on a scale and of an order of brutality much greater than anything that has been yet understood by the public. All of those foreign nationals rendered to Uzbekistan, for example, were killed during or following torture and buried in the desert.

It seems that Obama and the Republicans are combining to make sure that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the subject – which by all accounts will be damning enough – is never going to be made public in any way that reveals anything not already known. The Republicans – and Fox News – have already united behind the extraordinary assertion that the CIA were entitled to spy on the Committee’s activity on its computers, because the physical computers had been provided by the CIA.

Thanks to Price Benowitz LLP, DC Car Accident Attorneys.

Dust Bowl days

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Everything’s just fine!

A wall of dust as tall as 1,000 feet and 200 miles wide that roared across parts of West Texas and New Mexico is yet another sign of how rain-starved the region is.

National Weather Service meteorologist Charles Aldrich in Lubbock said Wednesday that the dust that lifted into the air on Tuesday evening came ahead of a fast-moving cold front that reached the city, already more than 1.5 inches behind on precipitation this year as drought lingers.

Most of the .17 inches of moisture that Lubbock’s gotten this year has been from snow and freezing precipitation.

Wind gusts Tuesday evening reached 50 mph and it took about 30 minutes for the leading wall of dust to move from the north end of Lubbock County to its southern border. Dust hung in the air afterward for hours and the strong winds persisted.

Visibility was reduced to about a mile in Lubbock. Northwest of Lubbock in Muleshoe and Friona the visibility was zero, Aldrich said.

Aldrich says the dust storm began in Amarillo and the wall of fine soil particles extended west into New Mexico and east to near Post, about 40 miles southwest of Lubbock. The front began in Kansas, and once it reached the parched Panhandle around Amarillo, the dust began to get kicked up.

It worsened as it moved south toward Lubbock.

“It’s drier up there, but it’s even drier down here,” Aldrich said.

About 67 percent of Texas is in some stage of drought, and projections from weather service officials in Fort Worth show the state got about half the average amount of rainfall for January and February. But the driest areas are in West Texas.

Dust storms like the one that hit the region Tuesday typically happen ahead of thunderstorms, Aldrich said.

But cold fronts also can spawn the monster clouds of dust that barrel across the flat terrain.

“If (the cold front) is as strong as the one we had yesterday, with the wind speed we had, it could definitely happen again,” Aldrich said.

Poor people’s health care

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

rivera

I remember when this happened. Joaquin Rivera, musician and activist, a wonderful, hard-working man who was loved and respected by his community, died of a heart attack in the ER waiting room and his lifeless body was then was robbed by junkies.

This, by the way, is the same hospital to which I was taken by the city’s EMTs when I had pancreatitis. The same lousy hospital that first diagnosed me, then told me it was a mistake, there was nothing wrong. How did I get the positive test? I asked the doctor. I don’t know, he said, shrugging.

Now I know better. When the gallstone was stuck, my pancreas were inflamed. When it finally passed, the test was negative. This doctor either did know this, or should have known this. I think he pretended not to know, because it was a medical emergency and the hospital did not want to be on the hook for the cost of my gall bladder surgery.

Let me tell you the difference between a crappy Tier 1 hospital and the reassuring efficiency of a Tier 3 facility: Joaquin Rivera wouldn’t have still been in the waiting room. When a patient presents with cardiac symptoms at a Tier 3 hospital, the triage nurse sees you immediately and you’re a priority. Because, you know, death.

This all came back to me the other night, when I was helping my son sign up for Obamacare. Once again, I was hit with a wave of disgust at how the cheapest plan restricted poor people to the worst hospitals in the city.

And what I wanted to say is, that while I’m happy with the plan I got (and my kid got), the fight doesn’t end here. Bad care is bad care, and injustice anywhere is still injustice everywhere.

H/t Attorney Steve Duckett.

Here’s some good news

~ susie

Justice

These caps were always bullshit and don’t even keep malpractice premiums down!

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the centerpiece of the 2003 medical malpractice overhaul, blasting the Legislature for creating an “alleged medical malpractice crisis” and concluding, in a 5-2 ruling, that a cap on wrongful death noneconomic damages violates the U.S. and Florida constitutions.

The opinion, written by Justice R. Fred Lewis, concluded that legislators created a crisis to push through the caps on economic damages in medical liability lawsuits and said the cap “has the effect of saving a modest amount for many by imposing devastating costs on a few.”

The resulting policy, Lewis wrote, is that the policy unconstitutionally discriminates against “those who are most grievously injured, those who sustain the greatest damage and loss, and multiple claimants.”

H/t Attorney Kush Arora.

Daring Dems to fight back against the Kochs

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment
Charles Koch looks like a nice guy posing for a dentures ad, but he's your enemy unless you're rich.
No, Charles Koch is not some harmless old dude posing for a dentures ad.

Hold on to your laptops: According to The New York Times, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid has an idea. He wants Dems to launch a media counterattack against two prominent plutocrats who are on a mission to destroy democracy in America — what’s left of it — by spending untold millions on blatantly dishonest pro-Republican campaign ads:

Democrats say the strategy of spotlighting the Koch brothers’ activities is politically shrewd. The majority leader was particularly struck by a presentation during a recent Senate Democratic retreat, which emphasized that one of the best ways to draw an effective contrast is to pick a villain, one of his aides said. And by scolding the Koch brothers, Mr. Reid is trying to draw them out, both to raise their public profile, and also to help rally the Democratic base.

“Well, duh,” my friend Swamp Rabbit said as I fed the wood stove in my Tinicum shack. “You ain’t gotta ‘pick a villain’ when he’s right there in the flesh, swinging a bat at you.”

“Not unless you’re a modern-day Democrat,” I said. “Dems have to check the polls before they defend themselves, even when they’re in the middle of getting their asses kicked.”

It’s true. The billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, have been demonstrating for years that they are serious about destroying labor unions, minimum-wage laws, environmental regulations, government-sponsored health care and everything else that might interfere with their money lust and benefit average citizens. There is no right-wing yahoo candidate they wouldn’t spend a fortune to elect. The great film director Frank Capra couldn’t have invented plutocrats as vile and greedy as the Kochs. They are impossible to caricature.

And yet the Dems in Washington are only now getting around to fighting back, even though midterm elections are less than a year away and the Kochs, for months, have been cranking out expensive propaganda on behalf of Republican candidates.

“I know Dems these days ain’t got no courage and don’t have no heart,” Swamp Rabbit said. “But ain’t there a few Dems in Congress that at least have a brain?”

“I don’t know, rabbit. Maybe they should ask the Wizard of Oz to help.”

But that’s a dead end, too. The closest thing Dems have to the Wiz is Barack Obama, and he turned out to be an even bigger fraud than the Wiz in the old movie.

Ha ha

~ susie

David Gregory

He’s absolutely awful. But his replacement might be even worse:

NBC News President Deborah Turness is in Washington, D.C., this week and will meet with “Meet the Press” host David Gregory and executive producer Rob Yarin to discuss changes to the format of the show, network sources said Monday.

The meeting, which will take place on Thursday, is part of Turness’s ongoing effort to improve “Meet the Press,” which has suffered in recent years and came in third place behind ABC’s “This Week” and CBS’s “Face the Nation” last quarter.

[…] Sources said that improvements to “Meet the Press” will be one of Turness’s chief concerns on her two-day visit. The show’s fourth-quarter ratings marked the lowest total viewers “Meet” has had in a fourth quarter since 1991. Its ratings in the coveted 25-to-54 demo were the lowest in the show’s history.

The enemy of your enemy

~ susie

fascists

Is not always your friend:

To progressives who have been celebrating the revolution in Ukraine: Be careful what you wish for. Ukraine now has the first European government in decades in which outright fascist parties have gained a significant role in the executive branch. In other European countries, far-right parties have won seats in the parliament, but not secured real power in the cabinet. Of course, not all Ukrainian revolutionaries are fascists or Nazis, as asserted in recent Russian propaganda. But it is equally wrong and irresponsible to assert that the presence of fascists and Nazis in the new government is merely Russian propaganda.

When the far-right Freedom Party became part of Austria’s cabinet in 2000, the European Union issued sanctions against Vienna, and the New York Times was full of exposes of party leader Jörg Haider. But when the far-right Latvian National Alliance joined a conservative government in 2011, it was barely noticed in the Western media. And because the fascist party Svoboda (Freedom) and the Nazi shock troops of Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) played a vanguard role in Ukraine’s anti-Russian revolution, their role in the new revolutionary government has been glossed over in the Western media, with no serious exposes so far.
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