This is a significant step forward for justice on the tribal reservations, especially the women who are the victims of widespread domestic violence and sexual crimes:

A measure designed to ease stubbornly high rates of violent crime, including rape and sexual assault, within Indian reservations will be signed into law by President Obama on Thursday.

Advocates of the Tribal Law and Order Act, which took three years to put together and passed the Senate last week, say it will ensure that more crimes, including murders and serious assaults, are reported and prosecuted amid worries that many cases go unpunished.

The measure gives tribal courts tougher sentencing powers and sets stricter rules to gather and collect more data on crimes. Special U.S. prosecutors will be appointed to tackle what advocates of the law describe as an epidemic of violence.

The president is due to sign the bill into law during a ceremony at the White House on Thursday afternoon.

Supporters said the current congressional session was the most active in decades in improving conditions for Indian reservations. Earlier this year, Obama signed a law that boosted health-care provisions for Indian communities.

The reservations overall have violent-crime rates of more than twice the national average, according to a congressional investigation.

Indian Country Today has more:

Also, tribes prosecuting individuals for crimes that could land them in jail for more than a year must provide defendants with the same right to a lawyer that they would have in state or federal court.

“The 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act notably did not include a right to counsel even though it is a constitutional (6th Amendment) right that also applies to the states,” said Navajo lawyer Chris Stearns. “My understanding is that this giant exception was made because back then no one thought that tribes would be able to pay for attorneys, or that there were even attorneys around at all on the reservation.”

[...] Whitney Phillips, a spokeswoman for Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D., a major champion of the bill in the House, said tribes that don’t have the resources to provide defense counsel or house inmates for longer sentences can continue to operate under the existing one-year sentencing provisions in the Indian Civil Rights Act, which does not require that defense counsel be provided.

“Because the provision is optional, it will not place any additional costs on tribes who choose not to participate in the enhanced sentencing provision,” Phillips said.

Hannah August, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said the law will not cost tribes anything unless they choose to exercise the enhanced sentencing authority it provides.

Of course, that places the cost burden on the tribes, and not all of them can afford it. So they'll be "allowed" to maintain a two-tiered system of justice if they can't pay for the better version -- which, come to think of it, makes them just like the rest of our country!

This really is a national disgrace. There are numerous studies linking this epidemic of prison sexual abuse to eventual committing of violent crime, yet there seems to be no concerted or sustained effort to force prisons to deal with it at the source. Every once in a while, some kind of report comes out and there's a big fuss, but nothing changes:

The Justice Department reported Thursday that 12 percent of incarcerated juveniles, or more than 3,200 young people, had been raped or sexually abused in the past year by fellow inmates or prison staff, quantifying for the first time a problem that has long troubled lawmakers and human rights advocates.

The report comes as those advocates say that the Obama administration is moving too slowly on reforms that would reduce rape in U.S. prisons and as corrections officials are pressing Justice to overhaul reform proposals it is reviewing.

Four former commissioners on a blue-ribbon prison rape panel that spent years studying the issue say they fear that authorities are deferring to concerns by corrections officials that reforms would cost too much, while not focusing enough on prison safety and the effects of abuse on inmates.

The study by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported a "very high rate of staff sexual misconduct" against juvenile inmates. It cited two facilities in Virginia and one in Maryland, among others.

"These figures are appalling," said Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, a group that advocates for prison reform. "We stripped a prisoner of their ability to defend themselves. They can't control where they go; they can't control whether the shower has a light bulb in it."

Continue reading »

We're not even in flu season yet, and already hospitals are overloaded. I have to wonder how many cities are ready for this:

BALTIMORE — To Mitchell Goldstein, the flood of sick children seemed endless. Day after day, nearly three times as many kids as usual streamed into the rainbow-colored pediatric emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, sniffling and feverish, worried parents hovering.

The press of children with swine flu was so relentless that doctors opened an annex in a hospital dining room to handle the overflow. "Our worst day" was Sunday, Oct. 11, says Goldstein, one of the ER doctors. "We had 15 to 20 patients an hour. It was 24/7. There wasn't a lull."

Last week, the epidemic of ailing children let up somewhat. But doctors here are expecting a new run of flu patients — the children's parents. "What we see first in (children) we see two to three weeks later in adults," says Trish Perl, the hospital's director of infection control.

The scenes at Johns Hopkins are being repeated at hospitals in Denver and Duluth, Seattle and San Diego, as waves of flu patients arrive at their doors, doubling their emergency room volume. Just as significant is the effect on intensive care units: A relatively small number of flu patients are requiring intensive care, but some are so ill they will need round-the-clock care for weeks.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere expect the number of patients needing hospitalization and intensive care to rise. Such an influx of intensive care patients eventually could force some hospitals to cancel services such as elective surgery, they say.

"Why did President Obama declare a national emergency? Because what's going on at Hopkins is happening across the country," Perl says. "An infection that generally doesn't appear to be severe is pushing hospitals to their limit."

The White House declaration, announced Saturday, was designed to give hospitals the flexibility to move patients to satellite facilities if they are overwhelmed in dealing with an outbreak that is now widespread in 46 states and afflicting millions of people, says Reid Cherlin, an administration spokesman.

"H1N1 is moving rapidly, as expected," Cherlin says. "By the time regions or health care systems recognize they are becoming overburdened, they need to implement disaster plans quickly."

[...] To many analysts, swine flu appears to be two overlapping epidemics: one a cascade of mild to moderate cases that is stressing hospital emergency rooms, and the second a narrow stream of unusually young patients who need intensive care.

[...] Connie Price, chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health, the city's public hospital, says, "I've been living this" since Aug. 28, when the hospital's lab reported 12 positive tests for swine flu.

"Since then we've been inundated," she says. "In a typical flu season, we may hospitalize 15 patients. With H1N1, we've hospitalized 10 times that many. We're not even in flu season yet."

Health care costs are exploding. A robust public option would create competition that would lower costs, and increase access to life-saving medicine.

But wait! I have an idea! Let's eliminate the public option, and for good measure, take away the rights of the victims of medical malpractice by passing "tort reform." Even though, it um, doesn't work. You know, if by work, you mean lower health-care costs and do anything to help regular people afford health insurance.

But if you've been trained by "Permanent Majority" Rove, and your real purpose is to 1) Keep your corporate slop-providers happy 2) Punish a group that often gives donations to Democrats (lawyers) and 3) Pretend you actually care a whit about people who don't get Yacht Shoe Weekly, then bingo! You have your made up issue.

Thankfully, the American Association for Justice has begun a campaign to tell the truth about this issue, about the 98,000 people who lose their lives each year due to preventable medical error:

The American Association for Justice announced today it is launching what it called the first phase of a nationwide ad campaign "to educate lawmakers about the epidemic of preventable medical errors and how tort law changes won't lower costs or cover the uninsured."

The ads, running in Washington publications and on online news sites, say the estimated 98,000 deaths from preventable medical errors is "like two 737s crashing every day for a whole year."

But the ad concludes:"Would we blame the passengers or the airlines?"

Well, we know who Republicans and Blue Dogs would blame. The passengers. The pilots. The unions. Gay Marriage. Stem-cell research. But never the big corporations who make the planes.

Thankfully, we know better.

Disclosure: I'm damn spankin' proud to be working with the American Association for Justice to protect patients' rights.

DOWNLOADS: (1383)

PLAYS: (13898)

Embed

This weekend the righties got all worked up about the supposed "brutality" of union thugs in St. Louis who they say beat up a black conservative tea partier named Kenneth Gladney who came out to protest the Obama health-care plan on Thursday. They even had a big protest the next day, along with a press conference featuring Gladney in a wheelchair.

But take a look at the video of the supposed assault. It enters the scene a bit late -- an SEIU member is already on the ground and appears to be injured, but we can't tell what the cause was. As he's laying there, other SEIU members come to his protection, and one of them pulls down Gladney; both men fall to the pavement. Both quickly get back up. There appears to be little to it. [A section of the video showing the supposed assault is in slow motion.]

Indeed, it's readily apparent that Gladney seems completely unhurt. He wanders out to the crowd, chats with the cameraman, flags down a cop, and saunters back to where police decide to handcuff the man who knocked him down. As you can hear, the man protests that he was just keeping Gladney away from his fallen friend.

The next day, Gladney is at the press conference in a wheelchair. He claims to be too medicated to speak, so his lawyers and fellow tea partiers do it for him.

Does this seem real to you? Sure looks fake to me.

Right-wingers love to bring up cases of fake hate crimes and overblown racial-profiling claims as proof that these phenomena don't really exist to the extent that their victims claim. (See Ann Coulter for the most recent example, but Michelle Malkin has made a minor cottage industry out of this specious narrative.) But they sure do love it when a minority conservative can make a reverse-the-charges accusation (usually involving race) against liberals -- no matter how dubious the claims.

We can see, moreover, that the right-wing teabaggers intend to create as much physical provocation as possible and then claim victimhood when something erupts -- even when there's nothing. (See yesterday's history lesson for more on this.)

Even worse, this kind of nonsense creates permission for right-wingers to then indulge in the "defensive" violence we've read them fantasizing about on right-wing gun forums. You know, that "Second Amendment" threat we've been hearing.

At the end of the video, I've added a snip from a friend of Gladney's, who remarks: "I wish I'd been there with you, bro, it'd have turned out a lot different, I promise you."

That's what worries the rest of us.

Good thing we'll never have another hurricane again, huh? Just one more bright spot in the Bush legacy:

WASHINGTON — The economic crisis is jeopardizing the nation's ability to handle public-health emergencies and possible bioterrorist attacks, according to government leaders and a new report.

Federal and state governments are cutting programs that help communities respond to disease outbreaks, natural disasters and bioterrorism incidents, and that "could lead to a disaster for the nation's disaster preparedness," a report released Tuesday warns.

"The economic crisis could result in a serious rollback of the progress we've made since Sept. 11," 2001, said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the Trust for America's Health, a non-partisan research group. Federal funds are down, 11 states have already cut public-health budgets, and more could follow as the economic crisis worsens.

If emergency medical supplies are not maintained or if hospitals can't handle a huge influx of patients, the result will be more deaths and illnesses, Levi said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff underscored the concerns in an interview Tuesday with USA TODAY editors and reporters. His top concern, Chertoff said, is a "mass event: a big outbreak of plague or some other kind of biological weapon or a nuclear explosion."

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's two year, $1.4 million dollar investigation into what he claims is "an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas" to justify his support for voter ID laws, resulted in just 26 cases. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following C&L's ongoing coverage of this issue that all of the cases were "against Democrats, and almost all involving blacks or Hispanics." What's more, of the 26, only 8 were actually cases of fraud. "In 18 of the 26 cases, the voters were eligible, votes were properly cast and no vote was changed – but the people who collected the ballots for mailing were prosecuted," yet Abbott refused to investigate a serious case of apparent ballot-box stuffing of "more than 100 ballots – potentially more than in all of Mr. Abbott's other vote-fraud prosecutions combined" - "in Highland Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country with hundreds of million-dollar homes and where both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney once lived."

In more than 2/3 of the cases in Greg Abbott's epidemic, he actually charged volunteers who merely helped elderly and disabled people to be able to vote because they didn't add their name to the envelope to show that they carried the sealed envelope to a mailbox for them - a crime Abbott saw fit to spend an average of more than $53,000 each to pursue of a Federal Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Grant that is supposed to go to enforce state and local laws with an "emphasis on violent crime and serious offenders." Serious indeed.

Continue reading »

So what else is new? Wall Street Journal, emphasis added:

So on the day that the Mitchell report on steroid use was being released, reporters again were asking why Bush — an owner of the Texas Rangers in the early 1990s — didn’t notice the epidemic of performance-enhancing drugs that was then taking hold of the game?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino was ready, pointing to an ESPN interview Bush did recently, in which he said that he’s thought long and hard about it, but doesn’t recall ever seeing or hearing evidence of a steroid problem. ...read more

Bush says that steroids "sullied" the sport...Ironic from the man that sullied not only the office of the President, but the global reputation of this country as well.

...And Jose Canseco claims "that Bush smirked his way through his ownership tenure, as syringes were passed around the locker room like a Christmas at Courtney Love's house."

graphic by Zen Comix for The Aristocrats (click image for larger)

Great new read by Ben Wallace-Wells in this month's Rolling Stone that exposes how the $500 Billion spent on the Drug War over the last 35 years has been all but a complete waste of time and money, and an absolute failure by any standard of measure.

[A]fter U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. [...]

Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. ...(read on)

That is a truly one great article every policy maker should have to read. I can't ever read a word on this topic without remembering how Col Oliver North was involved in smuggling cocaine into the U.S. under Reagan, circumventing Congress to pay for an illegal proxy war, which coincided with the birth of the crack epidemic at the very same time the President had declared a 'War on Drugs' (Remember Nancy's 'Just Say No'?) and the great expansion in the building of prisons and increasing sentences that has resulted in the disenfranchisement of generations of disproportionately black would-be voters to this very day. But of course all that was just another unintended but electorally significant consequence of Ronald Reagan's.

Greetings and salutations, sirens and scalawags. Melissa McEwan, Professional Not-Phyllis Schlafly at your service once again, coming to you live from the Annual Convention of Women Who Value Personal Autonomy and Frequent Hairstyle Changes. My conference schedule is full of Not Being Ann Coulter and Not Being Bay Buchanan, so I'll get right down to business:

Libby reports on the epidemic of suicide among war veterans, especially those just home from Iraq.

Jon Swift had no idea that that the world of competitive Bridge is a hotbed of anti-American sentiment.

Molly Ivors has issues with the latest pile of poop MoDo calls a column. Bean has the same problem. Don't we all? And won't we, until Her Majesty of the Anti-Feminist Jackassery just goes away?

Elle, PhD finds yet another reason to dislike David Vitter—and this time it doesn't have anything to do with the hooker who's a doppelganger for his wife.

Konagod says he's old enough to remember when a billion dollars was a sh*tload of money. (Don't let his youthful exuberance fool you. He's old enough to remember when a billion dollars was two sh*tloads of money.)

The Dark Wraith wants to know how you feel about the Democrats. (Right now, "I am very disappointed in the Democrats; however, even though I think, overall, they're a bunch of spineless cowards, at least they're my spineless cowards, so I'll support them in the 2008 elections because anything is better than letting the Republicans get control, again." is winning.) Creature says he's been burned one too many times. Yeah, I've been feeling a little scalded myself.

And some Quick Hits: Dare We Hope? … Keep Your Church out of Our State … Quirks and Quarks … Joe's joe v. Jane's joe … and it's Nap Time for Dick!

Seeya tomorrow! If you've got any hot tips, email me at shakespeares_sister at Comcast dot net.