Grazr
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Your World guest host Brenda Buttner invited Coulter to discuss her “great job” of bashing Dems; later on Fox, Coulter bristled over more challenging questions
On Your World, discussing her latest column, Ann Coulter repeated numerous false claims to assert that Democrats do not support the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism. However, hours later on Hannity & Colmes, when she was challenged on her claim that Osama bin Laden “was handed to Bill Clinton twice,” Coulter abruptly cut short her appearance on the show.
Read more
http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200608250012?src=other
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House leader Boehner says that the “problems are in Baghdad and within a 30 mile radius of Baghdad. The rest of the country is peaceful.”
See interactive diagram
At:
From: Poacnewsletter
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Seniors Going Broke with Bush’s Medicare Drug Plan
For nearly 40 years, Paul Sauerland helped people in need while working as a social worker for Catholic Charities. Now when he is in need, the Bush-run federal government is failing him.
Like millions of other retirees, Sauerland thought he would save money on prescription drugs under the Bush Medicare Part D plan. But this year, he and his wife will pay $4,500 for drugs he paid $3,000 for last year—before the Bush “reform.” In fact, he’ll spend $3,000 in the last six months of this year alone for prescription drugs.
Under the new Medicare Part D rules passed by Congress in 2003, out-of-pocket prescription expenses between the annual amounts of $2,251 and $5,100 are not covered. This nearly $3,000 gap has been dubbed the “doughnut hole.” Of the 11.8 million Medicare enrollees whose plans include a coverage gap, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates 6.9 million of them could hit the doughnut hole. A staff researcher says the real number may be higher.
Sauerland, 86, who has been blind since age two, reached the doughnut hole in July, after just six months in the Medicare program. He says he has no choice but to pay the cost because he needs his medications to keep his heart and thyroid conditions under control. But he’s not sure how much longer he can continue to pay out of pocket. His voice trails off when he tries to explain what choices he and his wife may have to make in order to afford the medicines he needs:
I’m so disgusted. I didn’t expect to get into this hole when the year was just about half over. I still have a half year to go. We got on Medicare because we were looking to save as much as we can. But when you’re living on a fixed income…if this keeps going on, I don’t know what will happen. We will have to give up something and cut down expenses some way. We’d be eating into our savings and that could be troublesome. I don’t want to think about it.
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Complete article at:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/08/22/seniors-going-broke-with-bush%e2%80%99s-medicare-drug-plan/
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Pharmacists must dispense Plan B
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
STEWART M. JAY
GUEST COLUMNIST
The Washington Board of Pharmacy has proposed granting pharmacists the right to refuse filling a prescription for any reason. Despite its neutral wording, this rule is intended to allow pharmacists to decline dispensing the emergency contraceptive, Plan B.
The proposed regulation is illegal because the Pharmacy Board has no authority to adopt it. The voters of Washington decided this question in 1991 by enacting Initiative 120, the Reproductive Privacy Act.
I-120 forbids all state agencies from discriminating against contraception “in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.” The people passed I-120 to prevent unelected agencies such as the Board from interfering with reproductive rights.
The Pharmacy Board proposes to do exactly that by authorizing any pharmacist to turn away a woman in need of emergency contraception.
The Board apparently thought that by wording its “conscience clause” generally, to allow pharmacists to refuse literally any prescription, the rule would not violate the anti-discrimination clause of I-120. That is legally wrong and reckless.
Discrimination occurs when a neutral regulation is adopted with the intent of singling out a specific practice for adverse consequences. The proposed rule, which has grown out of a desire to deny women access toPlan B, clearly discriminates against women under I-120.
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Complete article at:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/282142_pharm23.html
Stewart Jay is a law professor at the University of Washington School of Law. He was a principal drafter of I-120.
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One Year After Katrina
CHRIS KROMM, chris@southernstudies.org,
http://www.reconstructionwatch.org
Kromm is executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, which launched Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch last year and has just released the report “One Year After Katrina: The State of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.” The 100-page study features over 250 statistical indicators, as well as over 45 status reports, investigations, and community profiles in 13 key areas.
He said today: “Despite promises from national leaders to ‘do what it takes’ to rebuild the Gulf, many in the region have been left to fend for themselves — with tragic results. Without a bold, national commitment, the Gulf and its people won’t come back.”
From: Institute for Public Accuracy
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Katrina One Year Later: ‘The George Bush Dog-and-Pony Show’
Today, we launch the first in a series of profiles highlighting the experiences of Hurricane Katrina survivors—and exposing the gap between Bush administration spin and on-the-ground reality for the tens of thousands of survivors whose lives are still torn apart one year after the storm.
As the one-year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster approaches, some in the media have focused on New Orleans resident Rocky Vaccarella, who this week told President Bush he should have four more years in office.
But as Will Bunch on Attytood, Christy Hardin Smith on Firedoglake and others have written, Vaccarella’s appearance with Bush smells like the familiar smarmy sizzle of a White House PR campaign, this one swirling around the one-year anniversary of the Bush administration’s disaster relief debacle. Writes Bunch:
Turns out that the earthy Vaccarella—a highly successful businessman in the fast-food industry—is indeed a Republican pol, having run unsuccessfully under the GOP banner for a seat on the St. Bernard [New Orleans] Parish commission back in 1999.
Shouldn’t the media be a tad more skeptical about events like these? And isn’t the fact that Vaccarella was once a Republican candidate for office a relevant fact that should be mentioned, to help viewers place his effusive, nationally televised praise in context.
Maybe reporters should instead talk with Vaccarella’s childhood friend and Chalmette High School classmate Rickey Fabra:
All George Bush has done so far is a dog-and-pony show. Nothing has been done. If we can go to a third-world country and tear down bombed out buildings and rebuild them, how come we don’t have that here? George Bush is just saying something to satisfy the public and doing nothing.
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Complete article at:
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THE TROUBLE WITH BUSH’S ‘ISLAMOFASCISM’
Katha Pollitt, The Nation
If you thought the War on Terror was bad, get ready for the international disasters that the “war on Islamic fascism” will produce.
Complete article at:
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/40850/
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“Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States”
U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, MI-08, today announced release of a bipartisan House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report on the strategic global threat posed by Iran and the challenges of addressing its destabilization of the Middle East region.
The report, “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States,” is signed by Rogers and Ranking Democrat member Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey.
Complete report at:
http://www.mikerogers.house.gov/media/pdfs/iran082206.pdf
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three to see
Pat Oliphant: idiot! tell them you mean yes
http://www.uclick.com/feature/06/08/24/po060824.gif
Signe Wilkinson: faith-based relief group
http://www.uclick.com/feature/06/08/25/wpswi060825.gif
Monte Wolverton: Bush Above the Law