A Perfect Storm of Hunger

From the LA TIMES


The U.N.'s World Food Program is struggling as costs of food and fuel skyrocket while the numbers of people needing help surge across the globe. Millions are in danger.
By Edmund Sanders and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
April 1, 2008


KHARTOUM, SUDAN -- For 15 years, he's been a "grocer" for Africa's destitute. But he's never seen anything like this.

Pascal Joannes' job is to find grains, beans and oils to fill a food basket for Sudan's neediest people, from Darfur refugees to schoolchildren in the barren south.

Lately Joannes has spent less time shopping and more time poring over commodity price lists, usually in disbelief.

"White beans at $1,160," the white-haired Belgian, 52, cries in despair over the price of a metric ton. "Complete madness! I bought them two years ago in Ethiopia for $235."

Joannes is head of procurement in Sudan for the World Food Program, the United Nations agency in charge of alleviating world hunger.

Meteoric food and fuel prices, a slumping dollar, the demand for biofuels and a string of poor harvests have combined to abruptly multiply WFP's operating costs, even as needs increase. In other words, if the number of needy people stayed constant, it would take much more money to feed them. But the number of people needing help is surging dramatically. It is what WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls "a perfect storm" hitting the world's hungry.

( Read more... )

Bloggerheads tv

Are mainstream reporters in the tank for John McCain? Glenn Greenwald (blogger at Salon.com) vs Ana Marie Cox(Times.com, Wonkette)

Morality and Religion Pual Bloom (Yale University) vs Josh Knobe University of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill

Cosmic Bull Session John Horgan (Stevens Center for Science Writings) vs Sean Caroll (California institute of Technology)

The UN Plaza


Question: tell me something. Is there any reason why minorities commentators are ONLY brought on to discuss subjects as they relate to race? You mean to tell me that there are NO minority bloggers that can be found to opine on issues such as science, international politics, etc.? Of course, I won't get into the fact that we only seem to have a black conservative who seems to the go-to person on everything concerning race. *sigh* Anyway, there's good stuff here and there's actually a debate format, something, I'd like to see on television, instead of "gotcha" tactics and talking-over-each-other that passes for debate on television nowadays.

A great filleting of a badly written Wall Street Journal article on nursing qualification upgrades:

Wall Street Journal Shows Its Backside

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Annie

[UPDATE] My comment on the offending post didn’t appear for some time and then was inserted between prior published comments. I am adding it at the foot of this post.
[UPDATE DEUX] Right on cue, right wing med blogger, Kevin Pho, chimes in with his own brand of anti-nursing, conflation of issues screeching.
The WSJ Health Blog put on its best gender biased, turn of the Nineteenth Century paternalistic presentation of a fabricated problem with the nursing profession’s push to educate more nurses at the doctoral level. The public is ill served by tripe such as this. Readers will come away with the message that those nasty, not-quite-legitimate handmaidens of physicians are acting up, are defying their vows of obedience and obsequiousness, and are trying to take over medicine’s turf, while double-crossing patients and providing second rate care:

Nursing schools are making a push to award doctor of nursing degrees, a move that has some physicians and nurses worried, the WSJ’s Laura Landro reports.

No - not DN degrees, Doctor of Nursing Practice degrees - DNP. And doctoral education for nursing is not new - it’s been present since the early part of the twentieth century. Columbia, Yale, NYU, Case Western Reserve University, Johns Hopkins, Wayne State, Ohio State University, Vanderbilt, Emory, UCSF, University of Washington - all have doctoral nursing programs - and that’s just off the top of my head.

Dawn Bucher, a DNP, treats a child patient at Ivanhoe Clinic in Ivanhoe, Minn. Will this confuse the child?

More than 200 schools have started or are readying programs, and the National Board of Medical Examiners has agreed to develop a voluntary certification exam to establish a national standard for doctors of nursing practice.

A fresh supply of well-trained primary care practitioners could help counter a physician shortage.

Preparing nurses at the doctoral level isn’t entirely aimed at alleviating physician shortages. It is aimed at preparing more nursing researchers, more nursing faculty and more nurses able to advance the profession via new knowledge and the advancement of professional nursing practice. To frame doctoral education initiatives for nursing as a physician turf issue is dishonest, distorted and misleading - to the public, to nurses and to physicians.

The goal is to create “hybrid practitioner” who will have more skills and training than a nurse practitioner with a master’s degree, Mary Mundinger, dean of New York’s Columbia University School of Nursing, tells Landro. She adds that these students are being trained to have more focus than doctors on coordinating care among specialists and health-care settings.

But wait, nurse advocates say, there’s a nursing shortage too.

Here the AACN nursing shortage FAQ is linked, which is OK. But nurse advocates - who are they? No source or person is cited, and no nurse advocate, to my knowledge, is stating that the nursing shortage will worsen with the preparation of more nurses at the doctoral level. Infact, that is 180 degrees wrong. More doctorally prepared nurses will provide more nursing faculty, more nursing researchers and more nurses advancing nursing practice and new nursing knowledge.

Read rest here

There is a reason why I go to well-written and sourced blogs for my information.A great deal of MSM is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.

The road to torture: Or how our constitution was defiled

The Home of the Brave Blog has a lovely roundup, and I and linking directly to some of the articles and videos they found.

Introducing John Yoo, the guy who wrote the deciding memo that authorized the Repub. Admistration to torture people.

Orin Kerr notes that John Yoo's torture memo sounds very lawyerly in its arguments. This observation points to an important fact about legal discourse: Lawyers can make really bad legal arguments that argue for very unjust things in perfectly legal sounding language. I hope nobody is surprised by this fact. It is very commonplace. Today we are talking about lawyers making arguments defending the legality of torture. In the past lawyers have used legal sounding arguments to defend slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, rape (both spousal and non-spousal), Jim Crow, police brutality, denials of habeas corpus, destruction or seizure of property, and compulsory sterilization. (Oh, and they also decided a Presidential election using the flimsiest of legal reasoning. But I digress.).

Indeed.

Glenn Greenwald: John Yoo's War Crimes
I'd actually seen that one myself earlier today, because I read him a lot. As usual, a masterly look at what happened and the implications thereof. Also includes links to the actual memo itself, so we can see for ourselves exactly what is what. One of the strong points that he makes is:

It depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." Yoo wasn't just a law professor theorizing about the legalization of torture. He was a government official who, in concert with other government officials, set out to enable a brutal and systematic torture regime, and did so. If this level of depraved criminality doesn't remove one from the realm of respectability and mainstream seriousness -- if not result in war crimes prosecution -- then nothing does.

That John Yoo is a full professor at one of the country's most prestigious law schools, and a welcomed expert on our newspaper's Op-Ed pages and television news programs, speaks volumes about what our country has become. We sure did take care of that despicable Pvt. Lyndie England, though, because we don't tolerate barbaric conduct of the type in which she engaged completely on her own.


and finally here's The Timeline of Torture

Of course, in all the articles, there are more links with more info. But yeah, folks. Behold the use of our vaunted Constitution for toilet paper. But don't worry. The US is too powerful to be prosecuted. They'll probably all get away with it.(And when next a US soldier is tortured by whatever enemy, if I hear ONE jackass going "Why did they do this???? I'll...)

The ABB's Patriot Rant

ABB’s Patriot Rant (revised a wee bit)…

Most Americans study the Revolutionary War at some point in our lives. Along with the details of specific battles and historic moments, that history provides a very clear understanding of what an American patriot was and is.

This nation was founded by radicals. The rest of the folks were loyal to the monarchy. Speaking out against the monarchy was illegal…they called it sedition and it was punishable under law. Every single published quote…every single speech…every public gathering or meeting…every act of melting household items to make bullets or hoarding food to feed soldiers…all of that shit was radical as a motherfucker.

So, when my fellow citizens verbalize a blind and unquestioning respect of an elected office rather than question flawed policy those people are speaking the language of the loyalist not the patriot. And when citizens chastise fellow citizens for criticizing our government they are speaking the language of the loyalist and not the patriot.

A bitch is concerned that some of us who have been born Americans really don’t understand the responsibility of citizenship. It is important to remember that the final check in the check & balance plan is the power invested in each of us to check our government on bullshit.

We tarnish our legacy and insult our history when we embrace the ideology of non-involvement, blind trust and apathy rather than live up to our responsibility to question elected officials over the shit they do in our name.

We have a role to play and that role is to be active citizens...to vote, challenge and critique our government so that is shall be a government of the people, by the will of the people and answerable in all ways to the people.

Read Rest Here

When individual selfishness fucks the collective

Via: Pam's House Blend and Down with Tyranny

I have never understood why gay people have voted Republican. Until I read this anecdote:
There are still self-loathing gays and lesbians, though not many, who vote for Republicans. I met one the other day. He told me the Democrats will raise his taxes-- he's a corporate executive who makes far more than is reasonable-- and that he's voting for McCain who, he thinks, will lower his taxes further. And when I told him that McCain has a virulently anti-gay voting record and will be indebted to anti-gay bigots like John Hagee if he's elected, this guy says "that kind of stuff only applies to poor gays, not us" and that he doesn't care.


*Blink*


Right then.


Wonder what he would have made of this:


The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating whether a career attorney in the department was dismissed from her job because of rumors that she is a lesbian. The case grew out of a larger inquiry into the firings of U.S. attorneys and politicization at Justice under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Several people interviewed by the inspector general's staff described the case to NPR and said they came away with the impression that the Attorney General's office decided not to renew Leslie Hagen's contract because of the talk about her sexual orientation. Hagen received the highest possible ratings for her work as liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys' committee on Native American issues. Her final job evaluation lists five categories for supervisors to rank her performance. For each category, a neat X fills the box marked, "Outstanding." And at the bottom of the page, under "overall rating level," she also got the top mark: Outstanding.


Continuing From NPR:

Hagen would not comment for this story, but her job evaluation is consistent with what many others have said about her. A dozen former colleagues, inside and outside of the Justice Department, were interviewed for this story. They worked above, below and side by side with Hagen.

Each one raved about her work.

Sarah Brubaker, a tribal prosecutor in Michigan, said Hagen was "at the very top of any of the prosecutors I've ever worked with." Brubaker said it's very difficult "to find someone of her caliber, who is not only an excellent prosecutor, but also easy to work with — personable, professional."

...

The job Hagen filled at the Justice Department comes up for renewal every year. According to department sources, she had hoped to stay in the position rather than return to Michigan as a prosecutor and her supervisors wanted to renew her contract. But in October 2006, word came down from the attorney general's office that Hagen had to move on.

*Smile*


Want to tell me again that discrimination won't affect you rich gays? You can read the full news story here

Well hell!

Via: My new fav. blogger Down with Tyranny, I find the independent webzine The Seminal
And what do they have, the darlings? A graphic showing all the resignations of the Bush cronies were brought by him directly from Texas to run things when he ascended the Presidency in 2000.

The latest of these bloody criminals, is Alphonse Jackson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in other words, the POS that is responsible for most if not all of the misery that poor people are experiencing in getting public housing down in New Orleans. He, disgusting whats-it-not that he is, is facing federal investigation that is likely to lead to criminal charges, to wit:

The department's inspector general has been looking at whether Jackson improperly sought to punish the Philadelphia Housing Authority for refusing to turn over a $2 million property to a Jackson friend. A federal judge ruled yesterday that the city agency had not clearly shown HUD overstepped its authority by allowing an agreement on the spending of federal funds to lapse.

Jackson is also the target of investigations by a federal grand jury, the FBI and the Justice Department. Those investigations began after a speech in Dallas in April 2006, in which Jackson said he had arranged the firing of a contractor who told him, "I don't like President Bush."

Jackson later said he concocted the anecdote, and HUD's inspector general concluded that Jackson had not exercised improper influence over contracts. But the continuing probes are looking at whether Jackson was truthful when he told the Senate Banking Committee last May, "I don't touch contracts."

HUD sources have told the inspector general that Jackson intervened in the business of the New Orleans and Virgin Islands housing authorities to steer work to friends. Two government sources briefed on the probe said investigators have been working to get a key former aide to cooperate.

The inspector general has also been looking at whether an occasional golfing buddy of Jackson's had performed work on Jackson's property on Hilton Head Island, S.C. It is unclear whether that remains a part of the investigators' work. James Martin, a St. Louis defense lawyer representing Jackson, did not respond to e-mail or telephone messages left yesterday.

Full story here


One wishes that the rest of the revolting crew were also facing criminal charges, as Mr. Jackson is.(ESPECIALLY, KARL ROVE).However, at least, we've gotten rid of one more pestilence and scourge upon the land.Now, we've got to get the rest...