March 22, 2012

Study leaves little doubt, ill-effects of toxic gases associated with oil and gas drilling

http://summitcountyvoice.com/2012/03/20/colorado-study-shows-health-impacts-of-fracking/

Colorado study assesses potential health risks of toxic gases associated with oil and gas drilling
Posted on March 20, 2012 by Bob Berwyn

Pollution from oil drilling has potential health impacts.
Data leaves little doubt about ill-effects of toxic gases

By Summit Voice

SUMMIT COUNTY — Just a few weeks after NOAA researchers revealed findings that oil and gas development leads to elevated levels of air pollution along the Front Range, a Colorado School of Public Health study shows that air pollution caused by fracking may contribute to acute and chronic health problems for those living near natural gas drilling sites.

“Our data show that it is important to include air pollution in the national dialogue on natural gas development that has focused largely on water exposures to hydraulic fracturing,” said Lisa McKenzie, Ph.D., MPH, lead author of the study and research associate at the Colorado School of Public Health.

The report is based on three years of air quality monitoring. It found a number of potentially toxic petroleum hydrocarbons in the air near the wells including benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene and xylene. Benzene has been identified by the Environmental Protection Agency as a known carcinogen. Other chemicals included heptane, octane and diethylbenzene but information on their toxicity is limited.

“Our results show that the non-cancer health impacts from air emissions due to natural gas development is greater for residents living closer to wells,” the report said. “The greatest health impact corresponds to the relatively short-term, but high emission, well-completion period.”

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March 21, 2012

A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds

from:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/03/20/guest-post-a-doctor-on-transvaginal-ultrasounds/

Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds

March 20, 2012 By John Scalzi 548 Comments

A friend of mine is a physician who wants to speak about transvaginal ultrasounds but whose position makes it precarious to speak publicly about it. So I’m letting this doctor borrow my site for an entry to speak anonymously on the matter. Obviously, I will vouch for the doctor being a doctor and being qualified to speak on the subject.


Where Is The Physician Outrage?

Right. Here.

I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics.

I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.

I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.

In all of the discussion and all of the outrage and all of the Doonesbury comics, I find it interesting that we physicians are relatively silent.

After all, it’s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.

It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.

It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.

Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.

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March 21, 2012

Israel hearts Iran, Online campaign challenges tensions between the two countries.

Israel hearts Iran, Online campaign challenges growing tensions between the two countries.

http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/israel-hearts-iran-0022109

Amid growing tensions between Israel and Iran, two Israeli graphic designers have created a Facebook campaign aimed at challenging the warmongering rhetoric, as first reported by +972 magazine.

Ronnie Edri and Michal Tamir designed an emblem that reads, “Iranians, we will never bomb your country. We <3 you” and now dozens of Israelis have added it to their Facebook photos. The campaign also spurred the creation of similar emblems by Iranians.

Here are some examples of the online campaign:

March 21, 2012

Bold Progressives! stand with them

http://boldprogressives.org/?action_id=9718052&akid=.1551099.AIrOa0&form_name=splash-lightbox&rd=1&source=fbs-auto&taf=1

I'm in..

http://boldprogressives.org


AboutProgressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and its over 850,000 members nation-wide believe in fighting for bold progressive change. It’s not enough to agree with us on the issues we champion — heroes in Congress and candidates on the campaign trail that we support also believe in fighting for these values.

Founded in 2009 by Adam Green, a former MoveOn online organizer and Democratic party communications worker, and Stephanie Taylor, former MoveOn and SEIU organizer, the PCCC has been at the forefront fighting for progressive change ever since.

The Nation magazine awarded PCCC “Most Valuable Campaign” of 2011. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz calls PCCC “the top progressive group in the country.”

Some issues our members have taken on include:

•fighting to save the public option as part of health reform
•championing real net neutrality to keep the Internet open and free
•pressuring President Obama to let the Bush tax cuts expire
•supporting Elizabeth Warren to successfully set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
•helping keep Keith Olbermann on the air
•and fighting to preserve our social safety net and prevent cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
In addition to issues, we help bold progressives campaign, get elected, and bring the fighting spirit with them to Washington. We endorse bold candidates, help them run efficient and effective campaigns, raise money for them, and give volunteers the opportunity to help these campaigns succeed.

So far, our members have done great things for candidates, like:

•helping Bill Halter make tens of thousands of phone calls and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to take on Blanche Lincoln on the Arkansas Senate Democratic Primary
•making over 1 million phone calls in our Call Out The Vote program with Democracy for America in 2010 for candidates such as Raul Grijalva, Alan Grayson, Russ Feingold, Joe Sestak, and more
•endorsing our first candidate of 2012, Eric Griego, and helping him raise money to win in New Mexico’s 1st district
•helping draft Elizabeth Warren to run for Senate in Massachusetts in 2012 by raising over $450,000 and engaging tens of thousands of potential donors and volunteers
•and endorsing a slate of bold progressives for Congress in the 2012 election

March 16, 2012

George Clooney in handcuffs protesting human rights abuses in Sudan

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George Clooney in handcuffs protesting human rights abuses in Sudan. Join him by taking action: http://bit.ly/xd954d— in Washington, District of Columbia.

March 16, 2012

Horizontal Meets Vertical; Occupy Meets Establishment

http://www.thenation.com/article/166817/horizontal-meets-vertical-occupy-meets-establishment

Horizontal Meets Vertical; Occupy Meets Establishment

Occupy has cracked open the door that lets us imagine that another world is possible. Thousands of arrests, months of protest and acts of incredible personal risk and sacrifice have put inequality and Wall Street’s out-of-control political and economic power on center stage. As activity ratchets up this spring, the challenge is to get more people pushing that door open ever wider.

To build this movement, Occupy needs to connect with tens of millions of people who are watching the unfolding battle but are not yet involved. To sustain it, we must link this spring’s protests to victories where people live, learn and work. Focusing on three issues—housing, student debt and the devaluing of work—allows us to thread different strands of activity through a common analysis of how Wall Street, big banks and corporations have profited by tanking and then reorganizing the economy.

Saving the neighborhoods where we live: The houses of 11 million homeowners and their families are threatened by foreclosure or are underwater by $700 billion, drowning people in negative equity. The housing crisis is central to how 60 percent of wealth has been stripped from communities of color since the 2008 economic collapse. Writing down principal to fair market value would inject tens of billions of dollars into the economy, reduce average mortgages by hundreds of dollars a month and help create a million jobs.

Freeing ourselves from student debt: Students and their families now have nearly a trillion dollars of debt, with average debt totaling over $25,000. The explosion in student debt is a direct outgrowth of the defunding of education in state after state. Unlike corporate and other debt, student debt is excluded from bankruptcy relief, strangling students for life. Reducing student debt load and the interest rates applied to it would save hundreds of billions of dollars in debt payments. It’s a first step to creating equal access to education and giving students a fair start without a lifetime burden.

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March 15, 2012

Giving Dennis Kucinich His Due

http://www.thenation.com/blog/166761/giving-dennis-kucinich-his-due

Giving Dennis Kucinich His Due

Katrina vanden Heuvel on March 13, 2012 - 1:21 PM ET

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

A certain kind of politician is becoming a dwindling breed. I’m not thinking of the over-praised and frequently eulogized centrist, the kind who spends a career watering things down and gets lionized for having done so. I mean the bold, politically courageous people who make real the cliché, “Speak truth to power.” The ones who are, perhaps, a little too righteous, who don’t compromise easily, but who prove again and again a tendency to be correct. They are the ones who are harder to dismiss, no matter how much the pundits or corporate media try. They insert themselves into the national conversation, pushing their ideas and their vision into the debate.

Dennis Kucinich is one of those politicians. At least, he was. Last week, thanks in large part to Republican gerrymandering, he lost his bid for reelection. In his loss, the country loses something too. Whatever your view of Kucinich’s politics or style, he mattered a great deal.

Kucinich was never afraid to take the positions that should have been at the core of the Democratic party. He opposed the Patriot Act when few brave Democrats would join him. He was opposed to the Iraq war from the outset, whipping his colleagues against it, with the result that three-fifths of House Democrats voted against that immoral, illegal invasion. Once it began, he called on Congress to defund it, when few in his party were willing to go along. Despite almost no political support, he introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney, accusing him (rightly, I believe) of lying to the American people to get us into the war in Iraq.

March 15, 2012

Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen? by Jeremy Scahill

http://www.thenation.com/article/166757/why-president-obama-keeping-journalist-prison-yemen

Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?
Jeremy Scahill

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.

Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”

Shaye had no reverence for Al Qaeda, but viewed the group as an important story, according to Sharaf. Shaye was able to get access to Al Qaeda figures in part due to his relationship, through marriage, to the radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majid al Zindani, the founder of Iman University and a US Treasury Department–designated terrorist. While Sharaf acknowledged that Shaye used his connections to gain access to Al Qaeda, he adds that Shaye also “boldly” criticized Zindani and his supporters: “He said the truth with no fear.”

While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/15/jeremy_scahill_why_is_president_obama

The Obama administration is facing scrutiny for its role in the imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist who exposed how the United States was behind a 2009 bombing in Yemen that killed 14 women and 21 children. In January 2011, a Yemeni state security court gave the journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a five-year jail sentence on terrorism-related charges following a disputed trial that was condemned by several human rights and press freedom groups. Within a month of Shaye’s sentencing, then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced he was going to pardon the journalist. But Saleh changed his mind after a phone call from President Obama. Thirteen months later, Shaye remains behind bars. We speak to Mohamed Abdel Dayem of the Committee to Protect Journalists and award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. "Abdulelah Haider Shaye [is] a brave journalist who just happened to be on the wrong side of history in the eyes of the U.S.," Scahill says. "His crime seems to be interviewing the wrong people and having the audacity to publish the other side of the story."

Filed under Yemen, Drone Attacks, Drones, Freedom of the Press, Obama, War on Terror, Human Rights

Guests:Jeremy Scahill, award-winning investigative journalist and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army." His latest piece for The Nation is called, "Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?"
Mohamed Abdel Dayem, coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Committee to Protect Journalists.

March 14, 2012

Afghan Massacre: After Losing Homes in NATO Attacks, Victims Moved Near U.S. Base Hoping for Safety

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/14/after_afghan_massacre_grievers_left_to

As President Obama vowed to "spare no effort" to fully investigate the Afghan massacre on Tuesday, hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan protested against the United States. Many called for an end to the U.S. occupation in their country. We go to Kabul to speak with New York Times correspondent Graham Bowley, who reported on the surviving relatives of victims of the Afghan massacre, including Abdul Samad, who lost his wife, four daughters, four sons and two other relatives. "This is a very war-torn area and very poor," Bowley says. "During the surge in 2009, the coalition forces swept through this area and destroyed many of the villages. [Displaced residents] didn’t want to come back, but they were drawn back under the urging of the Afghan government. ... Abdul Samad and other people came back to this town ... It was only just over a mile from the camp where the American soldier was stationed. He thought it was going to be safe." We also speak with Nancy Youssef, McClatchy’s top Pentagon correspondent, who compares the massacre in Afghanistan with the U.S. killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha in 2005. [Rush transcript to come. Check back soon.]

March 12, 2012

Somehow, the Word ‘Peace’ Got Lost

http://passblue.com/2012/03/09/somehow-talk-about-peace-has-been-lost/

UN WOMEN'S CONFERENCE 2012

Somehow, the Word ‘Peace’ Got Lost

by Cora Weiss • March 9, 2012

This essay was adapted from a speech that Cora Weiss, president of the Hague Appeal for Peace, a network of peace and justice groups, read as a panelist on the “Women, War and Peace” debate held during the 56th Commission on the Status of Women this month at the UN. The debate that Weiss spoke at, on March 1, showed a film, “Peace Unveiled,” about women in Afghanistan.

Who comes from a place where there has been violence or war?

I have enormous admiration and respect for the women of Afghanistan. I mourn with them for the loss of life, the wounded, the babies frozen to death in refugee camps, the destruction to their homes and communities. And I celebrate their determination to be at the peace table.

The question after so many years of war and waste is: When will we stop making war? When will the currency of foreign policy stop being weapons? When will be become exhausted from exhausting all nonlethal means of resolving conflict before resorting to violence? When will we implement the Charter of the United Nations, dedicated to preventing the scourge of war? When will women be at all the decision-making tables to prevent war and to design the peace?

Humanity has abolished slavery, colonialism, apartheid and the prohibition of women voting. Why can’t we abolish war?

We gather for the annual Commission on the Status of Women conference at this time of year because March 8 is International Women’s Day, voted by the General Assembly in 1975 to be the United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace.

Somehow, peace has gotten lost.

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