Sunday, February 10th, 2013
PAUL HARRIS, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: One brave bankrupt farmer, and some lawyers willing to work on the come, just wouldn't get the message and behave like docile sheep. Bravo. I wish there were a fund to support this guy.
We'll see what our deeply compromised Supreme Court decides. And notice I found this in a British newspaper.
NEW YORK — As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.
On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.
Not that Bowman sees it that way. ‘I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong,’ Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.
Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto’s opposing legal teams will face off in front of America’s most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.
The legal saga revolves around Monsanto’s aggressive protection of its soybean known as Roundup Ready, which have been genetically engineered to be resistant […]
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Saturday, February 9th, 2013
CALEB BELL, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This very sad story is part of the increasing hate trend in American Christianity. What would Jesus do? Not what this Lutheran Pastor did, for sure.
A Lutheran pastor in Newtown, Conn., has apologized after being reprimanded for participating in an interfaith vigil following the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The Rev. Rob Morris, pastor of Christ the King Lutheran Church, prayed at the vigil the Sunday following the Dec. 14 shootings alongside other Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Baha’i clergy.
Morris’ church is a member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and the denomination’s constitution prohibits ministers from participating in services with members of different faiths.
It’s not the first time a Missouri Synod pastor has been reprimanded for joining an interfaith prayer service; a New York pastor also was suspended for participating in an interfaith service after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
LCMS president Matthew Harrison wrote in a letter to the Synod that ‘the presence of prayers and religious readings
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Saturday, February 9th, 2013
Stephan: Here is more evidence of how our regulatory agencies are corrupted. As the report notes, 'Food and Drug Administration approved the devices without clinical proof that they work.' More and more the illness profit system is running what amount to mass human studies using unknowing patients as the lab rats.
It’s another case of a beautiful idea colliding with some ugly facts.
The beautiful idea is the notion that clearing the blocked artery of a stroke patient with a device snaked right up to the blockage would salvage threatened brain cells and prevent a lot of disability.
A lot of stroke patients in the U.S. are already getting this endovascular (within-the-artery) treatment because the Food and Drug Administration approved the devices without clinical proof that they work. Medicare has begun paying for the treatment.
But now come those ugly facts. Three studies have now found no difference in outcome between patients who got the endovascular treatment along with an intravenous dose of a clot-busting drug called tPA, or Alteplase, and other patients who got only tPA.
‘There wasn’t really clear evidence that endovascular therapy added to tPA … was better overall than tPA as the standard treatment,’ Dr. Joseph Broderick told MedPage Today. ‘It was hard to detect a signal of benefit in the studies that were presented.’
Broderick, who led the largest of the three studies, was referring to disappointing results presented this week at the International Stroke Conference in Honolulu. He’s research director of the neurological institute at the University of Cincinnati.
Stroke specialists […]
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Saturday, February 9th, 2013
BILL MOYERS, - Healthcare Now
Stephan: The corruption of the regulatory agencies, by corporate interests which now more or less own the agencies, has produced crisis after crisis. It is a trend that is harming the health and wellbeing of the people of this country.
Click through to see Moyers actual interview.
The inauguration of a president is one of those spectacles of democracy that can make us remember we’re part of something big and enduring. So for a few hours this past Monday, the pomp and circumstance inspired us to think that government of, by, and for the people really is just that, despite the predatory threats that stalk it.
But the mood didn’t last. Every now and then, as the cameras panned upward, the Capitol dome towering over the ceremony was a reminder of something the good feeling of the moment couldn’t erase. It’s the journalist’s curse to have a good time spoiled by the reality beyond the pageantry. Just a couple of days before the inaugural festivities, The New York Times published some superb investigative reporting by the team of Eric Lipton and Kevin Sack, and their revelations were hard to forget, even at a time of celebration.
The story told us of a pharmaceutical giant called Amgen and three senators so close to it they might be entries on its balance sheet: Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and that powerful committee’s ranking Republican, Orrin Hatch. A trio of perpetrators who […]
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Saturday, February 9th, 2013
LIZETTE ALVAREZ, - The New York Times
Stephan: One of the nastier policies of the Right, part of their trend attempting to make the lives of the poor more miserable, was the mad scheme about drug testing welfare recipients. I think they thought it would push many poor off the rolls, because they believed their own fantasies about the poor as all being drug addicts and layabouts.
It was mean spirited and, as this report makes clear, ill advised at every level. Note, however, that facts appear to have no impact on the Republicans of Georgia. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Any state that would elect Paul 'lies from the pit of hell' Broun is capable of almost any fact free folly.
MIAMI — Ushered in amid promises that it would save taxpayers money and deter drug users, a Florida law requiring drug tests for people who seek welfare benefits resulted in no direct savings, snared few drug users and had no effect on the number of applications, according to recently released state data.
‘Many states are considering following Florida’s example, and the new data from the state shows they shouldn’t,
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