Posted by Elaine Magliaro
When I came across the following picture on the Internet this morning, I knew I had to post it as a “Picture of the Day.”
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FFS Library Update: Lawrence Lessig’s “Republic, Lost”
Although I have not personally had the chance to read “Republic, Lost” yet, I have written in the past about my admiration of Lawrence Lessig’s work on money in politics. His observations, logic and legal reasoning concerning the corrosive and corrupting effect of money in politics closely mirror my own. Rather than the often partisan scree of some analysts, Lessig favors a rational root cause analysis that does not rely on ideological polemic to make his points.
Mr. Lessig and his publisher, Twelve Books, have made “Republic, Lost” available in both .pdf and epub formats under the Creative Commons license. You can download it in either format at Lessig.org and we are making it available in the FFS Library in .pdf format (as always, free of charge). However, if you enjoy Mr. Lessig’s writing and insights as much as I do, you’ll probably want to buy a hard copy. It is available at IndieBound, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
Posted in Campaign Finance, Civil Liberties, Constitutional Law, Corruption, Democracy, Economics
Tagged Lawrence Lessig, Republic Lost
14 Comments
FBI Releases Preliminary Statistics for the Number of Law Enforcement Officers Killed in the Line of Duty in 2014
By Elaine Magliaro
Yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released preliminary statistics for the number of law enforcement officers who were killed in 2014. According to the FBI, those statistics show “that 51 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty” last year. That number is reportedly “an increase of almost 89 percent when compared to the 27 officers killed in 2013.”
Andy Campbell (Huffington Post) said that despite last year’s increase in deaths of police officers while in the line of duty, the 2014 “figure is well below the 64 officers who were killed on average each year between 1980 and 2014.” He said that “2013 actually saw the lowest number of officers killed in action in the last 35 years.”
Posted in FBI, Government, Law Enforcement, Police, United States
Tagged Law Enforcement Officers Killed in the Line of Duty
6 Comments
Wendell Potter: Court Case Against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Shows How Insurers Rip Off Working People and Their Employers
By Elaine Magliaro
Wendell Potter is a former CIGNA executive who became a healthcare industry whistleblower. He is an outspoken critic of the US private health insurance industry–“particularly HMOs, and the sometimes-hidden tactics insurers can use to increase their profits by creatively denying policyholders their healthcare benefits when needed the most.” He has advocated for reforms in the healthcare industry in this country. Potter is the author of Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans and Obamacare: What’s in It for Me? What Everyone Needs to Know About the Affordable Care Act.
Potter has an interesting article about Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan titled Court Case Shows How Health Insurers Rip Off You And Your Employer over at Crooks and Liars. In his article, Potter said that many Americans “blame Obamacare for every hike in premiums despite the fact that the rate of increase for most folks was actually greater before 2010, the year the law went into effect.” Potter noted that health insurers are delighted that many people “blame Obamacare for rate increases because it deflects attention away from them and, according to documents made public in a recent lawsuit against a big Blue Cross plan, the questionable activities they’ve been engaging in for years to boost profits.” Potter added that one of the reasons workers have been paying more for health insurance “is allegedly a common practice among insurers: charging their employer customers unlawful hidden fees.”
According to Potter, the unlawful fees “came to light when Hi-Lex Controls, an automotive technology company, took Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) to court in 2013” after the company became suspicious that BCBSM had been systematically cheating it over the course of nearly twenty years.
When Catholic Health Care Systems Own Your Doctor: The New Threat to Affordable Birth Control for Women
By Elaine Magliaro
Patricia Miller has a chilling article over at Salon titled When the Catholic Church owns your doctor: The insidious new threat to affordable birth control. Miller’s article opens with a story about a woman named Angela Valavanis. According to Miller, Valavanis’s first bad encounter with the Catholic health care system happened just after she delivered her second child at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois. The Catholic hospital “refused to allow her OB/GYN to tie her tubes because of Catholic restrictions on the procedure.” When she went for a postpartum checkup with her OB/GYN, Valavanis asked about going back on the Pill because she hadn’t gotten the sterilization she wanted while she was in the hospital. That’s when “she got another shock.”
Valavanis said, “My doctor told me that she couldn’t prescribe birth control because she had sold her practice to a Catholic health system.” Valavanis said her “mouth dropped open.” She added, “I was so confused to hear those words coming out of the mouth of an OB/GYN.”
Miller:
An OB/GYN who can’t prescribe birth control? It’s not some bad joke. It could be a reality if your doctor’s practice is purchased by a Catholic health system that then imposes the Ethical & Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, a set of rules created by the U.S. Bishop’s Conference that prohibits doctors from doing everything from prescribing the Pill to performing sterilizations or abortions.
Posted in Constitutional Law, Democracy, Health Care, Health Care Insurance, Hospitals, Pharmaceuticals, Religion, Reproductive Rights, Roman Catholic Church, United States, Women's Rights
Tagged Birth Control, Catholic Health Care Systems, Catholic Hospitals, Contraception, Contraceptives, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Vasectomies
14 Comments
John Oliver Slams America’s “Disgraceful” Maternity Leave Policy on Mother’s Day (VIDEO)
By Elaine Magliaro
Last night, John Oliver did a killer segment on the lack of paid family leave after the birth of a child in the United States. We hear a lot of politicians spouting off about family values these days, don’t we? Oliver said, “You can’t go on and on about how much you love moms but fail to pass legislation that makes life easier for them.” Unfortunately, many “family values” politicians show little respect for mothers and their need to have a paid leave in order to recover from childbirth and spend time with their newborns.
Inae Oh (Mother Jones) wrote, “As families gathered to celebrate Mother’s Day yesterday, John Oliver took to ‘Last Week Tonight’ to address the issue and show why current federal law allowing just 12 weeks of leave, all of which is unpaid and extremely limited, forces countless new mothers back to work or in jeopardy of losing their jobs.”
Colin Gorenstein (Salon):
Oliver explained that while there are a few laws in place to help working mothers and guarantee unpaid maternity, these laws don’t apply to nearly 40 percent of women in the workforce.
During his segment, Oliver said, “Mothers shouldn’t have to stitch together time to recover from childbirth the same way that we plan a four-day weekend in Atlantic City.”
Posted in Government, Humor, Hypocrisy, Politics, Short Video, United States
Tagged John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, Motherhood, Paid Family Leave, Paid Maternity Leave
4 Comments
Center for Media and Democracy’s Report Shows Federal Government Has Spent Over $3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows Where the Money Went
Lisa Graves
Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy
By Elaine Magliaro
The Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD) PR Watch reported last week on the $3.3 billion that the federal government has spent fueling the charter school industry in this country over the past two decades. According to a new financial analysis conducted by CMD, no one knows what all that money has actually bought.
Jonas Persson, a writer for CMD, said, “Despite the huge sums spent so far, the federal government maintains no comprehensive list of the charter schools that have received and spent these funds or even a full list of the private or quasi-public entities that have been approved by states to ‘authorize’ charters that receive federal funds.” He added, “And despite drawing repeated criticism from the Office of the Inspector General for suspected waste and inadequate financial controls within the federal Charter Schools Program—designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools—the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is poised to increase its funding by 48% in FY 2016.”
Democracy Now! said that the new report on charter school funding “claims charter schools are spending billions of dollars with nearly no oversight, regulation, or accountability.” Unfortunately, there is apparently “no comprehensive database showing how these funds are spent and what results they produce. “ According to Democracy Now!, the report “analyzes materials obtained from open records requests regarding independent audits of how states interact with charter schools and their authorizers.” The analysis found “that the anti-regulatory environment around charter schools coupled with their lack of financial transparency warrants a moratorium rather than increased charter funding.”
On the Subject of Freddie Gray’s Knife and Giving Police “Fair Leeway” to Make Mistakes in Their Enforcement of the Law
By Elaine Magliaro
Patrik Jonsson has an interesting article over at Yahoo News that I think is worth read. Titled What Freddie Gray’s Knife Says About Police Power in America, the article touches on the legality/illegality of Freddie Gray’s knife; police power that “has been abused during the tough-on-crime era that emerged in New York in the 1990s and spread nationwide”; knives having become “a favorite target for police under political pressure to clean up the streets”;
and courts giving police “fair leeway” to make mistakes in their enforcement of the law. Jonsson noted that a Supreme Court ruling last December (Heien v. North Carolina) said the “leeway” was necessary “for enforcing the law in the community’s protection.”
Jonsson noted that seizing a particular kind of knife had “been a cornerstone of New York City’s ‘stop and frisk’ policy, which allowed officers to frisk anyone that they reasonably thought “might be breaking the law.” He said that “there is widespread confusion across America about which knives are legal.” He added, “In the past four years, 11 states have ended bans on the kinds of new folding knives carried by Gray.”
Posted in Courts, Crime, Jurisprudence, Law Enforcement, Police, SCOTUS, United States
Tagged Freddie Gray, Stop and Frisk
4 Comments
Picture of the Day for May 10, 2015: On the Subject of Corporations Having Religious Beliefs
Posted by Elaine Magliaro
Posted in Conservatives, Constitutional Law, Politics, Religion, SCOTUS, United States
Tagged Picture of the Day
1 Comment
Picture of the Day for May 9, 2015: Chris Rock on Racism
Posted by Elaine Magliaro
Posted in Racism
Tagged Chris Rock, Racists
Comments Off on Picture of the Day for May 9, 2015: Chris Rock on Racism
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