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January 25
From Blackprof.com
President Bush talks to an audience member after he spoke in Washington DC
on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
"Hey fool, get the hell off me fo yo white azz get beatdown!"
While approximately 10,000 per year die from the effects of illegal drugs, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that an estimated 106,000 hospitalized patients die each year from drugs which, by medical standards, are properly prescribed and properly administered. More than two million suffer serious side effects.
An article in Newsweek put this into perspective. Adverse drug reactions, from "properly" prescribed drugs, are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. According to this article, only heart disease, cancer, and stroke kill more Americans than drugs prescribed by medical doctors. Reactions to prescription drugs kill more than twice as many Americans as HIV/AIDS or suicide. Fewer die from accidents or diabetes than adverse drug reactions. It is important to point out the limitations of this study. It did not include outpatients, cases of malpractice, or instances where the drugs were not taken as directed.
According to another AMA publication, drug related "problems" kill as many as 198,815 people, put 8.8 million in hospitals, and account for up to 28% of hospital admissions. If these figures are accurate, only cancer and heart disease kill more patients than drugs. Has the situation improved since the publication of this information? Hardly. Null et al have published the most comprehensive and well-documented study I have seen of deaths associated with medical practice. In this report, their research revealed some shocking facts. The findings are summarized in the abstract:
"A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics.
The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown in the following table is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251."
Drugs Number One Killer - The authors conclude: "When the number one killer in a society is the healthcare system, then, that system has no excuse except to address its own urgent shortcomings. It's a failed system in need of immediate attention. What we have outlined in this paper are insupportable aspects of our contemporary medical system that need to be changed -- beginning at its very foundations."
Although Pharamcuticals causes more deaths than street drugs, there is also personal responsbility...
People don't take good care of themselves, gets a little sick, and then want pills to fix the problems.
The companies then produce pills to "fix" the problems, and those pills, in turn, cause more problems ("side effects"). Most companies fully disclose the risks posed by the pills.
The doctors are simply the middle-man. They give a brief warning and then prescribe them to complaining patients. But they also get major kickbacks from Big Pharma in vacations, cars, etc.
People don't take the medicine as prescribed. They take it with Alcohol, other medications or more pills than they are supposed to take.
To be fair, this is NOT always the case. People have illinesses that are beyond their control and they have to take medicine to keep it under control or they will either get sicker or die.
It's starting to look like playing the experience card can win Hillary the nomination but lose her the election.
Commentary From Alternet.com
Rudolph Giuliani's ritualistic incantations of 9/11 have become a national joke. In truth, his inspirational presence was overshadowed by his failure to prepare the city for a terrorist attack.
Also he failed to upgrade the infamous faulty radios used by first responders, many of whom he infuriated by calling off the search for bodies at Ground Zero just when the volunteers felt they were on the brink of finding more.
Hillary's got her own equivalent of Giuliani's 9/11: her "experience." It's gospel to much of the public but some in the media aren't buying it.
Like Timothy Noah at Slate: "Oh, please."
And Ari Emanuel on Huffington Post: "Give me a break,"
What's the problem? For starters, the amount of experience she claims. "Thirty-five years takes you back to 1973," Noah writes, "half of which Hillary spent in law school, for crying out loud."
Emanuel asks, "And what about [Obama's] time at Harvard Law (where he was the first black president in the history of the Harvard Law Review)? Doesn't count? But your time at Yale Law does?"
Second, how much of that time was spent in government? Hillary's electability derives in large part from what she calls her "firsthand knowledge of what goes on inside a White House."
But, Noah writes, her "chief role [was] that of kibitzer." She "did not hold a security clearance, did not attend meetings of the National Security Council, and was not given a copy of the president's daily intelligence briefing."
Emanuel makes the case that, with Biden, Dodd, and Richardson out of the race, and Kucinich, who practically teethed on politics, marginalized, neither of the leading Democratic candidates has significant government experience.
"Going by years spent as an elective official," he writes, "Obama's 11 years exceeds Clinton's seven." But "even when you factor in Clinton's previous experience in the company of power," it comes out the same.
When Emanuel asks, "Where the hell does she come off claiming superior experience?" he shines a spotlight on the problem with the word. Experience, it seems, has two meanings, one nested inside the other. First, experience refers to the quantity of your various experiences. Second, however presumptive, is the presumption that they lead to wisdom.
Which is why Obama's people oppose Hillary's vaunted experience with the concept of judgment. In other words, does the sum of Hillary's experiences pave the way for their metamorphosis into experience infused by knowledge? According to Susan Rice at Huffington Post, Hillary has "fought to ensure our troops have the body armor they need while in combat, and she has passed laws so that returning soldiers are treated with dignity when they return home. She has placed education at the center of U.S. international assistance. She has been a leader in combating nuclear proliferation and the threat of nuclear terrorism."
On the other hand, we have her vote for the Iraq War Resolution. It not only helped condemn the Iraqi people to hell on earth, but became an open wound in her campaign. Thanks to judgment that can only be called short-sighted at best, there's no way her vote can be added to the tote board of her experience.
The same with the martial strains of her foreign policy in general. You probably remember when, speaking as the self-anointed voice of experience, Hillary told Obama that a president shouldn't make "blanket statements with respect to the use or nonuse of nuclear weapons." Other questionable decisions that she made slipped beneath the radar. Unfortunately for her, they couldn't fit beneath the gateway of judgment. Like the examples above, they were thus barred from the realm of genuine experience.
For instance, during the Senate debate over the Iraq resolution, Hillary was the only Democrat (bear in mind that includes Lieberman) to sign off on all of Bush & Co.'s claims about Iraq.
Back in 2002, she voted in favor of an amendment prohibiting the United States from cooperating with the International Criminal Court. You know -- that body of justice that comes in handy for prosecuting little things like genocide in Darfur.
Also, she defended Israel's right to occupy Palestinian territory, not to mention its erection of The Wall. Then she disrespected another international body of law -- the International Court of Justice -- which she denounced for calling on Israel to abide by international humanitarian law.
Finally, she refused to support the international treaty to ban land mines. Then she voted down a Democratic-sponsored resolution restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries using them against civilian-populated areas.
Picture her sending those last two down the pipeline to the land of experience. Judgment's gatekeeper must have laughed in her face.
Bottom line, imagine if Clinton wins the nomination and, as Noah writes, "a certain white-haired senator now serving his 25th year in Congress (four in the House and 21 in the Senate) wins the nomination" for the Republicans. "McCain could easily make Hillary look like an absolute fraud."
It's starting to look like playing the experience card can win Hillary the nomination but lose her the election. As Noah sums up, "If Clinton doesn't find a new theme soon, she won't just be cutting Obama's throat. She'll also be cutting her own."
Any reflective American can't help but wonder at politicians like Giuliani, during 9/11, and Clinton, with her front-row seat in the White House, enduring what for us would no doubt constitute transformational experiences.
But all that's affirmed to them is their preconceptions. What's more empty than a life filled with experiences that don't add up to experience?
This makes a lot of sense. In 35 years, Hillary has been in law school, participated in many political demonstrations and campaigns, worked under political leaders; intimately or otherwise but have never held a leadership position in government where she is making important decisions concerning policy until 2000 when she was elected Senator of the state of New York.
Hillary knows that her claims of "35 years experience" is a half truth and just smacks of deception. She is desperate to get nominated, but at what price? If Hillary dosen't get that lie in check, America just might end up spending 4 more years with another Republican President. January 17
Former congressman from Michigan Mark Siljander, here in an undated photo, was indicted Wednesday as being part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter. He's accused of lying about lobbying on behalf of an Islamic charity that was accused of sending funds to terrorists.
WASHINGTON (AFP) — A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted a former US lawmaker for his links to a charity that sent funds to an Afghanistan-based supporter of Al-Qaeda through banks in Pakistan.
Former Republican representative Mark Deli Siljander was named in a 42-count indictment against the Missouri-based Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), charged with "engaging in prohibited financial transactions for the benefit of US-designated terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar," the US Department of Justice said in a statement.
Siljander, 57, faces money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges in the case.
"The indictment alleges that IARA also employed a fundraising aide to Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks."
Hmmm, I sure hope this does not lead back to all those conspiracy theorist's idea's that Republicans actually backed the 911 attack based on the idea that America needed another Pearl Harbor, so that we would rise up and take on there agenda. January 15 
(CNN) -- Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both called for an end to a bitter fight in a racially charged debate that has roiled the Democratic presidential contest over the last few days.
At a news conference Monday in Reno, Nevada, Obama said that he is "concerned about the tenor the campaign has taken in the last couple days."
"I think that I may disagree with Sen. Clinton or Sen. Edwards on how to get things done, but we share the same goals. We're all Democrats, we all believe in civil rights, we all believe in equal rights," said the senator from Illinois.
"I think they're good people, they are patriots and they are running because they think they can lead this country to a better place, and I don't want the campaign in this stage to degenerate into so much tit for tat back and forth that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this."
Obama also warned his supporters to play fair.
"If I hear my own supporters engaging in talk that I think is ungenerous or misleading or in some way is unfair, then I will speak out forcefully against them and I hope the other campaigns take the same approach," he said.
After Obama's statement, Clinton released her own remarks, saying the heated exchanges "I know does not reflect what is in our hearts."
"We differ on a lot of things ... but when it comes to civil rights and our commitment to diversity, when it comes to our heroes -- President John F. Kennedy and Dr. King -- Sen. Obama and I are on the same side," she said. "And in that spirit, let's come together, because I want more than anything else to ensure that our family stays together on the front lines of the struggle to expand rights for all Americans."
Everything was fine until Bob Johnson, former owner of "Black Exploitation Television" and the purveyor of garbarge, in which he made his billions on, first had the nerve to be offended by another black person, when BET is a safe haven for exploiting common negative stereotypes of black people. Second, he implies that while the Clintons were championing causes that benefited the best interest of Black people. Senator Obama was somewhere smoking dope. January 11 Did Hillary Really Win New Hampshire?
Diebold Voting Machine
Could someone have messed with the vote in New Hampshire?
That is what some people are wondering, after looking closely at the totals in the votes for surprise Democratic primary victor Hillary Clinton, and for Barack Obama, who placed instead of winning as all the polls had predicted he would. And thanks to candidate Dennis Kucinich, we are likely to find out. Kucinich today filed a request, and a required $2000 fee, to order up a manual recount of the machine ballots cast in the state. (snip)
In New Hampshire, 81 per cent of the voting was done in towns and cities that had purchased optical scan machines from the Diebold Election Systems (now called Premiere Election Solutions), a division of Diebold Corp., a company founded by and still linked to wealthy right-wing investors. In those towns, all voting was done on the devices, called Accuvote machines, which read paper ballots completed by voters who use pens or pencils to fill in little ovals next to the candidate of their choice. The ballots are then fed into, read, and tallied by the machines. The other 19 per cent of voting was done in towns that had opted not to use the machine, and to use hand-counted paper ballots instead.
The machine tally was Clinton 39.6 per cent, Obama 36.3 per cent - fairly close to the final outcome. But the hand-counted ballot count broke significantly differently: Clinton 34.9 per cent, Obama 38.6 per cent.
Could something have happened in those machines to shift some votes away from Obama or some of the other candidates in the race, and over to the Clinton total?
If all the votes cast had split the way the hand counts split, Obama would have won New Hampshire by over 10,000 votes, instead of losing to Clinton by about 5500 votes.
Sources at the Democrat National Committee (DNC) said they’re still trying to figure out whom to sue amid a flurry of allegations of fraud, malfunctioning electronic voting machines and voter intimidation.
“It’s a forgone conclusion that if the race outcome defies the pollster predictions, there must have been corruption,” said an unnamed DNC source. “Just because it’s an intra-party contest, doesn’t mean we’ll subject the results to less scrutiny.”
The DNC source added that “Americans need to have faith in the electoral process, but the New Hampshire Democrat primary has the smell of Bush-Gore 2000 all over it. We’re determined to follow the facts where they lead.”
Now it begins! Stop the world, I want to get off!!! 
We Americans, in good conscience, cannot let chicanery go on again in this election. If there was crookery going on in the New Hampshire Primary with the votes, this problem needs to be nipped in the bud right now so that it won't spill over into the other states.
We have already had the last two Presidential elections stolen by fraud. We need to get this election right! The candidates, whether they are winning or not need to demand that all of the votes be counted in every primary even if they have to manually recount the votes done through the Diebold machines.
This is the time to see if Hillary really believes in Democracy and change. If there is proof of voter fraud she and McCain both should want to make sure that they will be getting in the White House fair and square.
Related Sites:
A new report by a US health foundation has found that Americans get the worst deal in terms of preventable deaths among 19 industrialized nations.
The report is published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs and is the work of researchers sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund, which is based in New York.
The authors found that while other countries dramatically reduced deaths preventable by effective health care between 1997-8 and 2002-3, the US did so only slightly. If the US had performed as well as the top ranking countries, 101,000 fewer deaths per year could have been prevented, wrote Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee, who are based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The best performers were France, Japan, and Australia.
To arrive at the figures, Nolte and McKee compared trends between 1997-8 and 2002-03 in deaths of people under 75 years of age whose cause of death was "considered amenable to health care". They called this figure "amenable mortality" and included the US and 18 industrialized nations in their analysis.
The authors wrote that amenable mortality accounts, on average, for about 23 per cent of all deaths under the age of 75 in men and 32 per cent in women, and it declined by an average of around 16 per cent in all countries over the period they studied.
However, the United States was an "outlier", they wrote, in other words it was far below the average, showing a decline in health care amenable deaths of only 4 per cent.
Nolte said in a press statement that:
"It is notable that all countries have improved substantially except the US."
The authors linked the results to the current political scene in the US:
"It is difficult to disregard the observation that the slow decline in US amenable mortality has coincided with an increase in the uninsured population, an issue that is now receiving renewed attention in several states and among presidential candidates from both parties."
Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President, Cathy Schoen said she was startled to see the US falling so far behind:
"By focusing on deaths amenable to health care, Nolte and McKee strip out factors such as population and lifestyle differences that are often cited in response to international comparisons showing the US lagging in health outcomes."
"The fact that other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less, indicates that policy, goals, and efforts to improve health systems make a difference," she explained.
This is a disgrace and everyone in the world sees it but those idiots in Washington thinks that there is no problem with our healthcare system.
Pharmaceutical Companies spend millions of dollars advertising their overpriced drugs on TV and claiming it cost billions to research new drugs, in which most of the research is paid for by the taxpayers. Some of the drugs they make for certain illnesses and conditions are only old drugs they tweaked up a little, gave it a new name and got the FDA to approve it and award them patents for free.
People pay all this money each year in health insurance and when they need it the most, the insurance companies figure out a way to get out of paying for the healthcare needed to save their lives.
Oh and hospitals won't even admit a patient until they contact their insurance company first. I remember almost 20 years ago, I was in a serious accident and didn't have medical insurance. The doctor was going to prescribe pain medication and send me home and fortunately, a nurse had the courage to tell him that if he didn't want to treat me, send me to a regional hospital instead of sending me home to suffer. When they did ex-rays of my injuries, I had a broken pelvis, shoulder and a fractured scapula.
Our system is very corrupted and full of greed and as a consequense, lives are lost, more lives than the war in Iraq does yet our politicians think it's ok!
What must we do to fix this?
January 09 Behind Every Great Man Is....
A Even Greater Woman! 
As of this posting, Barack Obama has came in first in the Iowa caucus with 38%. Edwards came in second with 30%, and Clinton finishes 3rd with 29%.
On the Republican side, Huckabee took 34% of the Republican vote, versus 25% for Romney and 13% each for Thompson and John McCain. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas finished 5th above Giuliani.
So I will say this: Go OBAMA GO! Go OBAMA GO! Go OBAMA.....
If he dosen't win another state, I am happy that he shut up a lot of folks by this initial win. That says a lot about the power of self-confidence, conviction and persistence and not relying on lobbist money to win.
Win or lose. It is the fight that impresses me. January 02
Wishing peace, happiness and prosperity for you and those you love through all the days of the new year.
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