Yesterday, President Bush vetoed expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover 10 million kids, even though the government program is a proven success with broad bipartisan support. Bush is expecting House conservatives to sustain his veto. But kids have a message for them: You want us in your photo ops? You better vote for our health care.
To learn the facts and counter the spin about SCHIP, click here.
Doctors and nurses should not participate in executions ordered by the state in breach of their ethical oath, said Amnesty International in a new report today.
The report, Execution by lethal injection – a quarter century of state poisoning, looks at the legal and ethical implications of the use of the lethal injection across the world.
“Medical professionals are trained to work for patients’ well-being, not to participate in executions ordered by the state. The simplest way of resolving the ethical dilemmas posed by using doctors and nurses to kill is by abolishing the death penalty,” said Jim Welsh, Amnesty International’s Health and Human Rights coordinator.
Since 1982, at least 1,000 people were executed by lethal injection globally – three in Guatemala, four in Thailand, seven in the Philippines, more than 900 in the USA and up to several thousands in China, where executions are a state secret.
In lethal injection executions, prisoners are commonly injected with massive doses of three chemicals: sodium thiopental to rapidly induce unconsciousness, pancuronium bromide to cause muscle paralysis, and potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Doctors have expressed concern that if inadequate levels of sodium thiopental are administered, the anaesthetic effect can wear off before the prisoner’s heart stops, placing them at risk of experiencing excruciating pain as the chemicals enter the veins producing cardiac arrest. Due to the paralysis induced by pancuronium bromide, they would be unable to communicate their distress to anyone.
For these reasons, these chemicals are not used by veterinary surgeons on animals for euthanasia. In Texas, the biggest user of lethal injection in the USA, the same drugs that are prohibited for use on cats and dogs because of the potential pain they might suffer are being used to execute.
Joseph Clark was executed in Ohio in December 2006. It took 22 minutes for the execution technicians to find a vein to insert the catheter. Shortly after the start of the injection, the vein collapsed and Joseph’s arm began to swell. He raised his head off the stretcher and said “it don’t work, it don’t work”. The curtains surrounding the stretcher were then closed while the technicians worked for 30 minutes to find another vein.
“The use of lethal injection does not resolve the problems inherent to the death penalty: its cruelty; its irreversibility; the risk of executing the innocent; its discriminatory and arbitrary application; and its irrelevance to effective crime control,” said Jim Welsh.
“Governments are putting doctors and nurses in an impossible position by asking them to do something that goes against their ethical oath.”
In China, the world’s top executioner, many, executions by lethal injection are carried out in mobile vans. The windowless chamber at the back of the vans contains a metal bed on which the prisoner is strapped down. Once the needle is attached by the doctor, a police officer presses a button and an automatic syringe inserts the lethal drug into the prisoner’s vein. The execution can be watched on a video monitor next to the driver’s seat and can be videotaped if required.
“There is a global consensus within the medical profession that the involvement of health professionals in carrying out an execution, particularly by a method using the technology and knowledge of medicine, is a breach of medical ethics; yet health professionals are participating in such executions.”
“Professional bodies have recently spoken strongly about this abuse of ethics, but governments want to hide the identity of participating doctors to shield them from the scrutiny of professional colleagues,” said Jim Welsh.
Amnesty International calls on world leaders to abolish the death penalty and urges them to take the opportunity to begin with a vote for a moratorium at the current session of the United Nations General Assembly when it is voted on later in 2007.
What does one say in an obituary about the true legacy of a man who did more in his lifetime to polarize American politics on the basis of race than any South Carolinian since Coleman Blease? Apparently nothing! Harry Dent’s true legacy, the Republican “Southern Strategy”, employed seemingly innocuous coded terminology to cloak the racist politics of the era in a polite vocabulary. Terms such as “states rights,” “strict constructionist” and “law and order” were used in the strategy to clearly convey to discontented racist white Democrats that the Republican Party would keep African Americans in their place at a time when the Democratic Party was becoming more open to desegregation and equal justice.
Racist white Democrats abandoned their party to African Americans and to whites who supported their equality. Once these former Democrats had joined the ranks of the Republicans they were duped into believing that the interests of those who controlled the Republican agenda were the same interests as their own. This is the cruel irony of the Southern Strategy. Millions of working class white people were duped into voting against their own interests by wealthy Republicans who convinced them that voting with the Democrats would create giveaway programs for welfare mothers and others who didn’t deserve support. The truth of the matter was that during the Nixon Administration the welfare went to the Republicans who controlled the military industrial complex and who were profiting from the war in Vietnam.
Instead of telling the whole truth about Harry Dent in the article they published about his death, the Post and Courier chose to highlight how he allegedly helped resolve the 1969 Charleston Hospital Strike, never mentioning nor explaining his infamous Republican Southern Strategy. How ironic that Harry Dent’s obituary should cloak his true legacy and the racist reality of the irreparable harm that he did with a depiction of Dent as a civil rights hero.
Charlie Smith, Charleston
South Carolinians will rally at the State House on Oct. 6 at 2pm to bring attention to the genocide in Darfur. The event is organized by the SC Darfur Action Group, which hopes that a rally will raise the issue of US funding for an African peace keeping force in Darfur in the presidential debates. They are taking advantage of the spotlight on South Carolina because of the early primaries here.
The US supported a UN Security Council resolution to urgently mobilize the force, but has not come through with anticipated funding.
Watch this powerful TV ad on YouTube. May it move you to join us on Saturday!
From Media Matters:
During the September 26 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh called service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq “phony soldiers.” He made the comment while discussing with a caller a conversation he had with a previous caller, “Mike from Chicago,” who said he “used to be military,” and “believe[s] that we should pull out of Iraq.”
Limbaugh told the second caller, whom he identified as “Mike, this one from Olympia, Washington,” that “[t]here’s a lot” that people who favor U.S. withdrawal “don’t understand” and that when asked why the United States should pull out, their only answer is, ” ‘Well, we just gotta bring the troops home.’ … ‘Save the — keeps the troops safe’ or whatever,” adding, “[I]t’s not possible, intellectually, to follow these people.”
“Mike” from Olympia replied, “No, it’s not, and what’s really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.”
Limbaugh interjected, “The phony soldiers.” The caller, who had earlier said, “I am a serving American military, in the Army,” agreed, replying, “The phony soldiers.”
Bush smirks on TV
nu-CU-lar, he keeps saying
while the world cringes
Becci Robbins
At the Pride march on Saturday, a woman stepped out of the parade to offer me a handout, which I stuffed into my back pocket without reading. Doing laundry yesterday, I found the handout and took a better look. It read:
On the 11th annual National Day of Silence (April 18, 2007), Erin Davies was faced with an unfortunate tragedy. She was victim to a hate crime. Because of sporting a rainbow sticker on her VW Beetle, her car was vandalized in red spray paint with the words “fAg” and “u r gay” placed all over the hood and driver side of her car. Despite immediate shock and embarassment, she decided to embrace what happened and keep driving her car as it is in order to increase public awareness about the blatant homophobia that exists in our society.
Mission:
Erin’s mission is to drive her fagbug on a cross country trip and take it to as many diverse communities as possible. She will be gathering feedback for her fagbug documentary, which will shed light on the intolerance that exists in our society. Erin’s goal is to get at least one million people to add fagbug rainbow stickers to their cars so that no one else is targeted like she was. Until that happens, her car will stay as it is!
Check out her web site, get a free sticker for your car, make a donation and read her blog (including a blurb about her time in Columbia).
Big 3 Dems’ Health Insurance Unfriendly to Women
By Susan Feiner, WeNews commentator
So who’s got the most women-friendly health care plan?
Is it Hillary, Obama or Edwards?
Answer: none of the above.
Only Dennis Kucinich offers what women really need: single-payer, universal health care.
To the others I have one question: Why are you ignoring over 50 years of experience in our peer nations, which show that the public provision of health care delivers far better results at far lower costs?
The national disparities in women’s deaths between the United States and countries such as Canada, France and Germany are horrendous.