The Gaytheist Agenda

D.C. is the first city to implement such a program, and hopefully it will start a trend.

The District will become the first city in the United States to distribute female condoms free, part of a project that will make 500,000 of them available in beauty salons, convenience stores and high schools in parts of the city with high HIV rates.
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The move is an official acknowledgment of the futility of relying solely on the use of male condoms, which have been distributed citywide for nearly a decade, to stem the District’s epidemic of HIV and AIDS. Officials said they are turning to female condoms to give women more power to protect themselves from HIV and sexually transmitted diseases when their partners refuse to use protection.
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“Anywhere male condoms are available, female condoms will be available,” said Shannon Hader, director of the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration. “We’re not saying that if you’re a school in this area, you can’t get female condoms. We’re trying to make every effort count to build on what already exists . . . to expand options rather than limit them.”
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Hader thought of HIV/AIDS “hot spots” identified in the HIV Heterosexual Behavior Study, which was released in tandem with the epidemiological report. In the behavior study, 75 percent of participants said they were in committed relationships. But nearly half, 46 percent, said they thought their last sexual partner had had sex outside the relationship. And nearly half, 45 percent, said they had had sex outside the relationship.
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Activists say poor women often are reluctant to protest when their husbands and boyfriends refuse to use male condoms because they are dependent on the man’s income.
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Definitely a good move for D.C. Now it’s up to women to take advantage of it and protect themselves.

 

It’s sometimes thought that migraines are just “really bad headaches” but they’re so much more than that. So to say that migraines stink is putting it lightly. What’s more, status migrainosus really, really stinks. It flat out sucks when one doesn’t have health insurance and therefore can’t get adequate treatment. But of course the US has the “best health care system in the world”, or so we keep hearing. But it’s only “the best” if you’re wealthy enough to afford it, or your employer provides good insurance (if they provide insurance at all).

 

This is yet another reason we need a massive overhaul of our health care system. Apparently in eight states plus the District of Columbia, it’s perfectly legal for insurance corporations to consider spousal abuse a “pre-existing condition” and to deny coverage or treatment on that basis. Talk about adding insult to injury!

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Under the cold logic of the insurance industry, it makes perfect sense: If you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you’re more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure.
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In 2006, Democrats tried to end the practice. An amendment introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), now a member of leadership, split the Health Education Labor & Pensions Committee 10-10. The tie meant that the measure failed.

All ten no votes were Republicans, including Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming), a member of the “Gang of Six” on the Finance Committee who are hashing out a bipartisan bill. A spokesman for Enzi didn’t immediately return a call from Huffington Post.

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Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for an insurance industry trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), said that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has proposed ending the discrimination. “The NAIC has a model on this that we strongly supported. That model bans the use of a person’s status as a victim of domestic violence in making a decision on coverage,” he said.

Yet Republicans claim that privatized health care is the best thing for us, and that under a government funded plan people would be denied necessary care. They seem to have it all quite backwards, as usual.

 

What bravery! Gus gets mauled by a bear and hikes back from Canada to the US so he can avoid the horrors of Socialized Medicine.

Michael Steel has complained that nobody takes the Teabaggers who turn Townhall Meetings into chaos seriously enough.

“We are not inciting anyone to go out and destroy anything. We’re not organizing the town halls; their senators are,” he said. “But instead of focusing on the fact that people are genuinely concerned about what is going on, this administration has the arrogance, the arrogance to look down at my mother, to look down at my co-worker.”

So how does he react when a member of his audience gets up to tell him how her mother died because the current system is completely broken?

Go on, Michael Steel, and tell us another one about how the Democratic administration isn’t paying enough attention to the concerns of others, and is looking down on people and their mothers. Real people are dying as a result of the current system and you seem to think it’s all about getting airtime. Perhaps if Amanda Duzak had been screaming incoherently about “Death Panels” and “The Nazis” killing her mother you would have taken her seriously.

 

But what else could be expected from the likes of Rush Limbaugh? First the Barney Frank video, in case you haven’t seen it yet:

 
Now Limbaugh:

Stay classy, Rush.

 

Based on the true story of Patsy Bates, “Insurance Jive” shows why it is the insurance companies that actually operate “death panels” — and demonstrates why we must stand strong in support of a public health insurance option.

 
Corporate beancounters who decide, based on profits, what care people will get–and if they will get care at all—are the real “death panels”. Some 46 million Americans are uninsured and up to 22,000 die every year as a result. Healthcare reform is desperately needed. Join Courage Campaign in supporting a strong public option.

 

This is beautiful. Yet another RWer compares healthcare reform to Nazism and Barney Frank is…frank with her.

If only more of our elected officials would do that this nonsense would come to a screeching halt.

 

Cal Thomas is yet another right winger bloviating about how proposed changes to the health care system will bring about tragedy. But he goes a step further than claiming The Government wants to take us out of the decision making process. He insists the evil Liberal Secular (which in the eyes of the RRRW always means atheistic ) Left wants to take God out of the process. Now I don’t recall God being part of any insurance corporation, let alone all of them, but then I could be wrong…

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Underlying it all is a larger question: Is human life something special? Is it to be valued more highly than, say, plants and pets? When someone is in a “persistent vegetative state,” do we mean to say that person is equal in value to a carrot? Are we now assigning worth to human life, or does it arrive with its own pre-determined value, irrespective of race, class, IQ, or disability?
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Human life, regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic class, IQ, disability, etc, is indeed precious. It is worthy of being nurtured and protected. What I can’t figure out is why the Right Wing is trying to pretend they’re champions for the needy, and that Liberals pose a great risk to them. It is the RW that persistently denounces and works against increases in the minimum wage that would provide poor people opportunities to support and sustain themselves. They fight tooth and nail funding for social service programs that provide aid to the poor, the disabled, the homeless, the elderly and other people who are less able or unable to care for themselves. They are the ones who insist homeless people are “bums” who want/deserve to be where they are and therefore shouldn’t receive anything. It is they who scream about their precious tax dollars going to “welfare mothers”. It was their hero Ronald Regan who critically cut mental health funding and closed psychiatric hospitals en-masse, literally dumping patients onto the streets.

The bottom line is not the bottom line. It is something far more profound. Our decisions regarding who will get help and who won’t are about more than bean-counting bureaucrats deciding if your drugs or operation will cost more than you are contributing to the U.S. Treasury.

I keep hearing this same refrain. “I don’t want some bureaucrat making my decisions for me”. Wake up guys. Bean-counters are already making your health care decisions for you. They work for your insurance corporation. They determine whether or not a particular claim will be covered and to what extent. Their job is to deny as much as possible so their CEO can maintain his gargantuan annual salary and the company can keep reaping immense profits. Of course that assumes you have insurance in the first place. You may be fortunate enough to have employer-provided coverage, but if you’re not then what? Have you ever tried to purchase your own insurance? It isn’t easy, trust me. Yet another way the insurance corporations maintain their bottom line is to deny coverage to people who have “pre-existing conditions”, which can include anything and everything. They’ll also deny you if you take certain medications or have had particular procedures done in the past. (I, for example, have been denied by multiple insurance companies because I have migraine disorder for which I take Topamax.)So essentially insurance is for healthy people who are unlikely to use it, but rather just keep paying their premiums and making nice profits for the corporation.

Do individuals like Cal Thomas think they’ll always be healthy and under the auspices of employer-provided health insurance? Do they think they’ll never lose their jobs or otherwise be at the mercy of the corporate beancounters whose job it is to deny, deny, deny? Of course maybe they’re just rich enough to pay for everything out of pocket in perpetuity which is why they don’t give a hoot about those who can’t.

The unnatural progression for many on the secular left is to see such a person as a “burden.” In an age when we think we should be free of burdens – a notion that contributes to our superficiality and makes us morally obtuse – getting rid of granny might seem perfectly rational, even defensible. But by doing so, we assume an even greater burden: the role of God in deciding who gets to live and who must die. Anyone who has seen the film “Bruce Almighty” senses how difficult it is to play God.
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Again, it isn’t Liberals who are persistently whining about various people being “burdens to society” and screaming for our precious taxes to be cut so we might not have to suffer as a result. We are not the ones who would allow men, women and even children die in the streets rather than part with a few extra dollars per year. We are not the ones who want the almighty dollar to dictate who lives and who dies. That would be the RRRW. (Perhaps that’s one reason they’re so insistent on having “In God We Trust” stamped on our money–there’s no way they can stamp “In Money We Trust” on their god. )

Reminder to Cal Thomas; it’s not “God” who is currently making decisions about life and death under our present health care system. It is corporate insurance bean counters.

The explosive town hall meetings are indications that Americans are trusting government less and less. So where should we go? The answer is in your wallet or purse. It’s on the money. Right now it is little more than a slogan, but what if it became true: in God We Trust.

Hey, I was right. It is all about the almighty dollar. And here I thought Thomas was claiming God had something to do with it all.

 

Being a vegetarian I can have a difficult time finding the foods and personal care products I need, particularly if I want to do it without going to multiple stores every time I go out shopping. Whole Foods, while admittedly more expensive overall than most stores, made it possible for me to not only find what I needed (including some things I simply couldn’t find elsewhere) but helped me avoid running all over town. But I’m now willing to make the extra efforts necessary. I am officially boycotting Whole Foods.

Yes, I was thoroughly disgusted by John Mackey’s diatribe in the Wall Street Journal in which he claims health care is just another commodity for people to buy rather than an inherent right. If you’re not wealthy enough to pay for it then too bad for you. But it goes far beyond that. I dug a little deeper after reading that article and I didn’t like what I discovered. In fact, I was appalled.

What’s wrong with Whole Foods?

(1) Aggressive monopolization. Tons of independent co-ops throughout the country don’t exist any more because Whole Foods bought them out. Whole Foods also absorbed all its significant competitors (Wild Oats, Bread & Circus, Fresh Fields, Bread of Life, Merchant of Vino, Nature’s Heartland, Food for Thought, Harry’s Farmers Market, Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Foods Markets, and U.K.-based Fresh & Wild). They’ve thus created a near-monopoly in the natural foods grocery business. Consumers are better served by a diversity of stores, but Whole Foods has been trying to wipe out the competition — and has been quite successful at doing so.
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(5) CEO posing as someone else on the Internet. For seven years, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted on the Yahoo Finance board about his company and its competitors while pretending to be someone else. By trashing rival Wild Oats, their stock price could drop and he could buy them out for less money. Mackey also had the gall to anonymously praise himself. (”I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!”) (6) He didn’t stop there: He also criticized specific employees, under the cover of anonymity. Daily Kos said of this, “The very idea of the founder and CEO of a major national corporation hiding behind a pseudonym to lambaste one of his own hourly wage earners on an online message board says something about the personal moral integrity of union-busting executives.” (7) After being discovered, he was unrepentant, trying to justify his behavior in a long blog post, and making a point to say specifically that his actions weren’t unethical.
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(7) Anti-Union. Whole Foods is so fiercely anti-union it has actually fired employees who were trying to organize one. As Common Dreams says, “Whole Foods matches Wal-Mart in its reputation for corporate anti-unionism. It’s a hostility rooted in a management whose ‘core values’ are intrinsically patrician and antidemocratic. The latter qualities were revealed in all their dismal hypocrisy most forcefully in 2002 when employees of the chain’s Madison, Wisconsin, store voted to unionize and join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). In a story that caught the attention of the New York Times and other media, Mackey had what might be described as a New Age temper tantrum, treating the specter of collective bargaining at one of his stores as a disaster of almost unspeakable proportions….The yearlong effort to defeat Madison’s first organizing drive revealed Mackey as a “socially enlightened” poseur, a New Age business type who talks about love and ecological footprints and other enlightened things, but who turns to the hard boot of corporate scare tactics and disinformation when confronted with a group of employees who dare to assert their democratic right to self-representation.” (1,10)
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(11) Misleading shoppers about its support of small farmers. Signs at Whole Foods Market say, “Help the Small Farmer — Buying organic supports the small, family farmers that make up a large percentage of organic food producers.” What they’re not telling you is that while the number of family farmers is a large percentage of the total, overwhelming majority of organic output comes from corporate farms. As Slate put it: “There are a lot of small, family-run organic farmers, but their share of the organic crop in this country, and of the produce sold at Whole Foods, is minuscule.” Slate also pointed out that Whole Foods has pictures and profiles of small organic farmers in their stores, but doesn’t actually carry products from those farmers. (14)
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(13) Obfuscating executive compensation. Forbes magazine says, “Media reports frequently tout Whole Foods’ pay policy, which caps the chief executive’s salary and bonus at 14 times the average worker’s pay. The Wall Street Journal, Slate.com, Harvard Business Review and BusinessWeek have all mentioned the pay cap, generally in favorable terms. But they all omitted one thing: stock options.” When you count stock options, Mackey really made close to $3 million, or eighty-two times the average workers’ salary. Forbes continues, “Whole Foods manages to obscure Mackey’s total pay package by ballyhooing the salary cap.” A company is certainly entitled to pay its execs whatever it wants, but the issue here is that WF is deceptive about how much its execs actually receive, relative to the lower-paid workers. (16)
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I shudder to think how much I’ve spent at Whole Foods over the past several years but they will not get another penny out of me. John Mackey can, to be quite frank, stick his greed, his dishonesty and his callous disregard for others where the sun doesn’t shine. While he’s at it he might want to start selling Velveeta, corn dogs and Tater Tots. Those seem to cater more to the tastes of the “I got mine, screw you” crowd he’s part of.