Prometheus 6

For Widely Used Drug, Question of Usefulness Lingers
By ALEX BERENSON

When the Food and Drug Administration approved a new type of cholesterol-lowering medicine in 2002, it did so on the basis of a handful of clinical trials covering a total of 3,900 patients. None of the patients took the medicine for more than 12 weeks, and the trials offered no evidence that it had reduced heart attacks or cardiovascular disease, the goal of any cholesterol drug.

The lack of evidence has not stopped doctors from heavily prescribing that drug, whether in a stand-alone form sold as Zetia or as a combination medicine called Vytorin. Aided by extensive consumer advertising, sales of the medicines reached $5.2 billion last year, making them among the best-selling drugs in the world. More than three million people worldwide take either drug every day.

But there is still no proof that the drugs help patients live longer or avoid heart attacks. This year Vytorin has failed two clinical trials meant to show its benefits. Worse, scientists are debating whether there is a link between the drugs and cancer.

After all, this is America. They have the freedom to get another job. 

Protections Set for Antiabortion Health Workers
Opponents Denounce Proposed Regulation Allowing Federal Officials to Pull Funding
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2008; A01

The Bush administration yesterday announced plans to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect doctors, nurses and other health-care workers who object to abortion from being forced to deliver services that violate their personal beliefs.

The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.

"People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. "Health-care workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their own conscience."

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
Author: Thomas Frank
List price: $25.00 USD

The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank is about how Conservatives, by which I refer to Jack Abramhoff and his confrères Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, started a process that resulted in our government being turned into a cash cow for Conservatives.

It enabled the subprime mortgage bubble and collapse. I'm sure it will be at least as helpful for the medical insurance companies.

Also, if I recall correctly, there's health information on your credit report...yup, check the bolded line from this, on employment background checks:

Aren't some of my personal records confidential?

The following types of information may be useful for an employer to make a hiring decision. However, under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, the employer is required to get your permission before obtaining the records. (See PRC Fact Sheet 11, "From Cradle to Grave: Government Records and Your Privacy," www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs11-pub.htm)

--------------->8---snip-snip!!---8<---------------

• Medical records. In California and many states, medical records are confidential. There are only a few instances when a medical record can be released without your knowledge or authorization. The FCRA also requires your specific permission for the release of medical records. If employers require physical examinations after they make a job offer, they will have access to the results. The Americans with Disabilities Act allows a potential employer to inquire only about your ability to perform specific job functions. (42 USC §12101)

The FCRA is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and I don't think the FCRA compels credit agencies to show YOU that information at all...after all, it's not credit information.

Oh, right...this is what brought all that on...

Prescription Data Used To Assess Consumers
Records Aid Insurers but Prompt Privacy Concerns
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 4, 2008; A01

Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

Collecting and analyzing personal health information in commercial databases is a fledgling industry, but one poised to take off as the nation enters the age of electronic medical records. While lawmakers debate how best to oversee the shift to computerized records, some insurers have already begun testing systems that tap into not only prescription drug information, but also data about patients held by clinical and pathological laboratories.

Missing 'spam king' kills self, family
By Kieran Nicholson, Howard Pankratz and Carlos Illescas
The Denver Post

BENNETT — Just four days after escaping a federal minimum-security work camp, "Spam King" Eddie Davidson shot his wife and child and wounded a teen-age girl before turning the gun on himself.

Sheriff's deputies responded to a report of gunfire in the small plains town of Bennett at about 11:15 a.m. today and found Davidson, 29-year-old Amy Lee Ann Hill and their 3-year-old daughter shot to death.

Davidson's most recent spam business, Power Promoters, was based in Bennett.

Arapahoe County Undersheriff Mark Campbell said the bodies were found laying near a Toyota Sequoia SUV in the driveway. Davidson's body was beside the driver's door, a pistol nearby, and his wife's body fell near the passenger side.

Once again, lawmakers are willing to impose on the District something they wouldn't contemplate for their home districts.

Of course. Why do you think D.C. school system got screwed? D.C. has been the victim of every urban experiment some Congressman wanted to run, because...

It matters not a whit to Mr. Souder or the NRA that District residents have a right of self-governance.

They do not. Just try that crap in New York City, Boston or Dallas. You remember what happened when the Feds came in to tell local school districts in the South how to act, right?

Trigger-Happy on the Hill
Writing D.C. gun laws isn't Congress's job.
Friday, July 25, 2008; A20

DISTRICT residents are sadly accustomed to congressional interference in their affairs [P6: See? No self rule]. Usually, the meddling comes in a bid to overturn local legislation. But a move to actually write a new gun law for the District represents a new low. Or, as Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) called it, "a special outrage."

The department's speed in trying to make the regulatory change contrasts with its reluctance to alter workplace safety rules over the past 7 1/2 years. In that time, the department adopted only one major health rule for a chemical in the workplace, and it did so under a court order.

U.S. Rushes to Change Workplace Toxin Rules
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 23, 2008; A01

Political appointees at the Department of Labor are moving with unusual speed to push through in the final months of the Bush administration a rule making it tougher to regulate workers' on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins.

"If we give fertilized eggs legal rights, abortion could be considered murder and a woman could be sent to jail for making the difficult life decision to terminate a pregnancy," said Crystal Clinkenbeard, spokeswoman for Protect Families, Protect Choice, a coalition of medical professionals, community groups and religious leaders who oppose the amendment.

The measure also could expand the reach of the law into other arenas, legal experts say. For instance, if a woman miscarries, she could be held responsible if it were found she caused it, even unintentionally. If she smoked or drank while pregnant, her behavior might be considered negligence. Damaged eggs might be eligible for monetary damages. The use of fertilized eggs at fertility clinics or in medical research labs would come into question because the disposal of unused eggs could be considered homicide.

Colorado Voters Will Be Asked When 'Personhood' Begins
By Ashley Surdin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 13, 2008; A04

LOS ANGELES -- A proposal to define a fertilized human egg as a person will land on Colorado's ballot this November, marking the first time that the question of when life begins will go before voters anywhere in the nation.

The Human Life Amendment, also known as the personhood amendment, says the words "person" or "persons" in the state constitution should "include any human being from the moment of fertilization." If voters agreed, legal experts say, it would give fertilized eggs the same legal rights and protections to which people are entitled.

"We all understand that the death of this kid is tragic. However, his actions that led to him being in that predicament don't even begin to rise to the level of the sacrifice that Findley made," said Vince Canales, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 89. "Everybody needs to take a minute and focus solely on putting him to rest. We'll get back to the investigation when we have properly buried Corporal Findley."

This kid's death is beyond tragic, it's murder. And only police officers had the opportunity to kill him.

Pr. George's Jail Guards Are Mum in Death Probe
By Aaron C. Davis and Rosalind S. Helderman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 2, 2008; A01

Several Prince George's County correctional officers who had access to a 19-year-old inmate found strangled in solitary confinement Sunday have initially declined to speak to investigators of the slaying, a source familiar with the interrogations said.

The Maryland State Police and federal agents were investigating the death of Ronnie L. White, who was killed less than 36 hours after he was booked into the county correctional center on first-degree murder charges in the hit-and-run death Friday of county police Cpl. Richard S. Findley.

The decision isn't as bad as I thought it would be. It doesn't allow the ability to buy guns from coin operated vending machines, which seems to be the N.R.A.'s goal. We have the individual right of ownership affirmed, and the locality's right to restrict transactions and concealed carry.

You're still going to get more dead people, though.

Deadly Consequences -- But the Right Call
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, June 27, 2008; A17

Few landmark Supreme Court rulings have been so widely predicted as yesterday's decision striking down the District of Columbia's ban on handguns. The mere fact that the court agreed to hear the case was a pretty good indication that the justices were itching to make some kind of big statement about the Second Amendment. Questions from the bench during oral arguments in March left little doubt as to which way the wind was blowing.

This case, for me, is one of those uncomfortable situations in which my honest opinion is not the one I'd desperately like to be able to argue. As much as I abhor the possible real-word impact of the ruling, I fear that it's probably right.

Over the last decade, the government and aid agencies have spent millions of dollars on everything from poster campaigns to television ads to soap operas, all urging families to accept daughters. Governments have repeatedly vowed to crack down on clinics that perform sex-determination tests, yet these remain readily available.

Around here, they cost about $60, or five times the cost of a legal ultrasound. Prosecutions are extremely rare.

Girls disappearing as India advances
Researchers find that modernization and economic growth add to the growing number of abortions for sex selection.
From the Associated Press
8:10 AM PDT, April 19, 2008 

SINGHPURA, INDIA — Standing in front of his small brick home, in a courtyard where the dirt has been packed down by generations of barefoot children, the middle-aged mustard farmer doesn't bother to hide his exhaustion.

"Only someone who has been through something like this can understand the size of my catastrophe," said Sukhpal Singh Tomar. For years, he has struggled to find some reason for his suffering, but has come up with little. He shrugged: "It must be my karma."

The catastrophe? His daughters -- all eight -- so many he sometimes stumbles over their names. But his wife, Shanti, never forgets, and the words spill from her like a breathless prayer: "Anu-Jyoti-Poonam-Roshni-Sheetal-Bindu-Chandni-Shezal."

They have been born in a country leaping headfirst into the globalized world but still holding tight to a preference for boys, enlarging an ever-widening gender imbalance in the second-most-populous nation on earth.

Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger
By MARC LACEY

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing.

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

It's still damn near always a Black man on the wrong end of a fussilade of bullets. And in this specific case, Undercover Mike still emptied his weapon, reloaded and emptied it again, all without being sure he fired at all.

Yes, There’s the Trial, but There Are Also Broader Statistics
By CLYDE HABERMAN

Inevitably, emotions ran high this week with the start of the trial in the 50-shot police killing of Sean Bell. That much was obvious in protests outside the courthouse in Queens. It was obvious in angry comments posted on blogs.

For some New Yorkers, the entire Police Department stands in the dock with the three indicted detectives, branded as out of control.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to step back from the Bell case for a dispassionate look at some numbers. They show that notwithstanding disasters like the shooting of unarmed men like Mr. Bell or Amadou Diallo, New York City police officers as a group are more restrained than ever in drawing their guns.

See why folks want hope? 

Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers
By PATRICIA COHEN

Shannon Neal can instantly tell you the best night of her life: Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003, the Hinsdale Academy debutante ball. Her father, Steven Neal, a 54-year-old political columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times, was in his tux, white gloves and tie. “My dad walked me down and took a little bow,” she said, and then the two of them goofed it up on the dance floor as they laughed and laughed.

A few weeks later, Mr. Neal parked his car in his garage, turned on the motor and waited until carbon monoxide filled the enclosed space and took his breath, and his life, away.

Later, his wife, Susan, would recall that he had just finished a new book, his seventh, and that “it took a lot out of him.” His medication was also taking a toll, putting him in the hospital overnight with worries about his heart.

Still, those who knew him were blindsided. “If I had just 30 seconds with him now,” Ms. Neal said of her father, “I would want all these answers.”

Kidney Thefts Shock India
By AMELIA GENTLEMAN

GURGAON, India — As the anesthetic wore off, Naseem Mohammed said, he felt an acute pain in the lower left side of his abdomen. Fighting drowsiness, he fumbled beneath the unfamiliar folds of a green medical gown and traced his fingers over a bandage attached with surgical tape. An armed guard by the door told him that his kidney had been removed.

Mr. Mohammed was the last of about 500 Indians whose kidneys were removed by a team of doctors running an illegal transplant operation, supplying kidneys to rich Indians and foreigners, police officials said. A few hours after his operation last Thursday, the police raided the clinic and moved him to a government hospital.

Many of the donors were day laborers, like Mr. Mohammed, picked up from the streets with the offer of work, driven to a well-equipped private clinic, and duped or forced at gunpoint to undergo operations. Others were bicycle rickshaw drivers and impoverished farmers who were persuaded to sell their organs, which is illegal in India.

Read the review, then the first chapter, which I have stolen.

I'm buying the book TODAY.

‘The Bloody Shirt’
By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY

PROLOGUE

The title of this book refers to a small footnote to the brutal war of terrorist violence that was waged in the American South in the years immediately following the Civil War.

The terror began almost as soon as the Civil War ended in 1865; it lasted until 1876, when the last of the governments of the Southern states freely elected through universal manhood suffrage was toppled in a well-orchestrated campaign of violence, fraud, and intimidation—thereby putting an end to Reconstruction, erasing the freedmen’s newly won political rights, and securing white conservative home rule to the South for a hundred years to come.

In some ways the small incident in question was no different from thousands of others like it that took place in those years. At ten o’clock on the night of March 9, 1871, a band of one hundred and twenty men on horseback, disguised, heavily armed, even their horses cloaked in white sheets to conceal any identifiable markings, surrounded the house of one George R. Ross deep in the river-cut country southeast of the town of Aberdeen in Monroe County, Mississippi. Allen P. Huggins, a Northern man who had settled in Mississippi after the war, was staying the night there, and he was awakened by a loud voice calling upon Ross to bring out “the man who was in the house.”

This is long, but you're gonna want to read it all. You may even choose to save a copy of it. In making it available to us, The University of Texas Austin's Law in Popular Culture collection has singlehandedly (as it were) reversed my long-held opinion that the State of Texas can't get a mother fucking thing right. In the face of all future error, you will always be able to get me to admit they got at least one thing right.

"It" is the text of "The Space Traders," plus commentary, by Derrick Bell.

You know that attack ad Huckabee pulled? Here it is...and notice one of Huckabee's complaints about Romney's record is "No Executions."

ABA seeks execution moratorium
Study of states finds 'deeply flawed' process, inequities
By Maurice Possley
October 29, 2007

The American Bar Association, concluding a three-year study of capital punishment systems in eight states, found so many inequities and shortfalls that the group is calling for a nationwide moratorium on executions.

In a study to be released Monday, the attorney organization, which has more than 400,000 members, said that death penalty systems in Indiana, Georgia, Ohio, Alabama and Tennessee in particular had so many problems that those states should institute a temporary halt to executions immediately until further study can be conducted.

They were among eight states studied that provided the basis for the association's call to halt executions nationwide.

The (Offspring of) Motherhood Bill

Congress’s Republican minority leaders are picking the wrong fight in suddenly attacking a notably bipartisan push to expand health insurance coverage to hundreds of thousands of children of the working poor. A Democratic plan to renew the highly successful program and enlarge it through financing paid by higher tobacco taxes was understandably attracting support from rank-and-file Republicans — at least until President Bush and their caucus leaders began denouncing it as a foot in the door for some dark government design for socialized medicine.

They argued that Boston FBI agents knew mob hitman Joseph "The Animal" Barboza lied when he named the four as killers in the 1965 death of Edward Deegan. They said Barboza was protecting a fellow FBI informant, Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi, who was involved in the hit.

The four wrongly convicted men were treated as "acceptable collateral damage" because the FBI's priority at the time was taking down the Mafia, their attorneys said.

Judge: FBI Helped Frame 4 Men for Murder
By DENISE LAVOIE
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 26, 2007; 12:50 PM

BOSTON -- The FBI helped frame four men for a 1965 murder and withheld information for decades that could have cleared them, a federal judge ruled Thursday in ordering the government to pay the men $101.7 million.

"The FBI's misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction," U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner said in issuing her ruling in the civil lawsuit.

She called the government's argument that the FBI had no duty to get involved in the state case "absurd."

Charlton testified that he asked Justice officials to reconsider and had what he called a "memorable" conversation with Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty. Michael J. Elston, then McNulty's chief of staff, called Charlton to relay that the deputy had spent "a significant amount of time on this issue with the attorney general, perhaps as much as five to 10 minutes," and that Gonzales had not changed his mind. Charlton said he then asked to speak directly with Gonzales and was denied.

Last August, D. Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales's chief of staff, sent Elston a dismissive e-mail about the episode that said: "In the 'you won't believe this category,' Paul Charlton would like a few minutes of the AG's time." The next month, Charlton's name appeared on a list of prosecutors who should be fired, which Sampson sent to the White House.

Fired Prosecutor Says Gonzales Pushed Death Penalty
Figures Show Attorney General Often Overrules U.S. Attorneys' Arguments Against Capital Charges
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 28, 2007; A07

Paul K. Charlton, one of nine U.S. attorneys fired last year, told members of Congress yesterday that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has been overzealous in ordering federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty, including in an Arizona murder case in which no body had been recovered.

Justice Department officials had branded Charlton, the former U.S. attorney in Phoenix, disloyal because he opposed the death penalty in that case. But Charlton testified yesterday that Gonzales has been so eager to expand the use of capital punishment that the attorney general has been inattentive to the quality of evidence in some cases -- or the views of the prosecutors most familiar with them.

Things got better, it seemed. Jamie returned to air-conditioning work. He donned a white tuxedo and married Muriel in a summer ceremony at the Elks Lodge. He sang some country-western karaoke and talked about getting his wife to go deer hunting.

A few days after Thanksgiving, a FedEx truck delivered an envelope to the Dean farm just as Jamie was about to go hunting. It was a form letter of redeployment, as impersonal as a bank statement.

“It was downhill after that,” Muriel says.

[TS] Asked to Serve Again, a Soldier Goes Down Fighting
By DAN BARRY

HOLLYWOOD, Md.

The sniper fired. It was a clean shot, if there is such a thing. And down for good fell another American soldier.

His name was Sergeant James Dean, but everyone called him Jamie. He was the farm boy who fished, hunted and tossed a horseshoe like nobody else. He was the guy at the end of Toots Bar, nursing a Bud and talking Nascar. He was the driver of that blue Silverado at the red light, his hands on the wheel, his mind on combat horrors that made him moody, angry, withdrawn.

Now here he was, another American soldier, dead. Only Sergeant Dean was killed at the front door of his childhood home, the day after Christmas and three weeks before his redeployment, shot by a sniper representing the government for whom he had already risked his life in Afghanistan. His wife and parents received the news not by a knock on the door, but by gunfire in the neighborhood.

“If they had just left him alone,” says his wife, Muriel.

Ah, the joys of anonymous comments.

So I post about the pro-life bomber in Austin, right? And I check the anonymous comments and see someone with an appreciation for murder dropped by.

Who cares about a babykilling abortion mill anyway?

On April 27th, 2007 Rev Spitz (not verified) says:

Grow up. Do you think anyone actually cares that a babykilling abortion mill is blown up? You don't seem to concerned about the babies that are being murdered at the babykilling Austin Women's Health Center.

I've edited out the boy's web site URL. No linky-love for terrorists...no networking with those who would murder those who everyone agrees is alive.