The only reason to feel sorry for this Charles Manson follower and would-be assassinator of our then President Ford, is that she is 60 years old and STILL she is called Squeaky. Is Lynette such a bad name?
Do you think she is different now? It is hard to imagine a 60 year-old Manson follower. It is like imagining your grandparents’ having sex. But not as gross. Eeewww. Eeeeewwww. I need to stop now.
From CNN, Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Wendell Potter . . . [t]he former vice president of corporate communications at insurance giant Cigna, who left his post, says the industry is playing “dirty tricks” in an effort to manipulate public opinion.
“Words matter, and the insurance industry is a master at linguistics and using the hot words, buzzwords, buzz expressions that they know will get people upset,” he told CNN Wednesday.
Now a senior fellow on health care for the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, Potter writes a blog on health care reform. He is focusing on efforts to defeat legislation supporting a government health care plan — something he supports.
In early July, Potter testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, telling senators that “I know from personal experience that members of Congress and the public have good reason to question the honesty and trustworthiness of the insurance industry.”
Potter described how underwriters at his former company would drive small businesses with expensive insurance claims to dump their Cigna policies. Industry executives refer to the practice as “purging,” Potter said.
“When that business comes up for renewal, the underwriters jack the rates up so much, the employer has no choice but to drop insurance,” Potter had said.
In an e-mail to CNN, Cigna spokesman Chris Curran denied the company engages in purging.
[go to CNN for more of the article]
I’m guessing this is what my mother (of blessed memory) would comment on my blog.
Hi, darling! [said with a thrill that only a mother could have in corresponding with her child]:
Please be careful. There are crazies out there who might be reading your blog. So, I called the Secret Service. They are so efficient; the person who answered knew exactly who I was. Technology is SO marvelous. I asked for protection for you. The agent wasn’t sure, so I called the White House and they said that I looked marvelous at the last march on the Mall. Who knew? I wasn’t feeling great that day, chemo and all, so it must have been my new wig. Thank Goodness your father was there. He takes such good care of me. When I went over to talk to anti-abortion people, they were very nasty and your father stepped in. My ovaries haven’t worked in decades, so why couldn’t they have a civil conversation on a theoretical level? Which proves my point about protection for you.
Your sister came along on the march as my physician. (Isn’t it a MUST to have a health care professional in the family? Don’t worry, I remember how you helped get me a $200 rebate so paying for law school was worth it.) Having a travelling doctor IS the new accessory for us old people. I have Dad and your sister. Let the Secret Service top that for Obama. By the way, isn’t he handsome? So smart, so funny, such a leader. If only he were Jewish and not married, he would be perfect for your sister if she weren’t already happily married to a wonderful man (I am not schlepping in Central Park to look at birds). After all of these years of keeping an eye out for eligible men, it is hard to remember to stop looking now that she is married. I forget things at my age, but I am always thrilled when I remember that she is, in fact, married.
You looked thin last week. Is there enough protein in your diet?
Well, off to chemo, then a gallery and then there’s a protest at One Police Plaza. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get arrested. I have your card in case I need a lawyer. One should get arrested for a good cause once in one’s life. But only for peaceful protests.
So, all right, Tootsie. See you for Sunday night dinner.
Love, Mom
After a fitful night’s sleep, my son wanted to pretend we were trains this morning before he scampered off to camp. After going to Penn Station to watch all of the trains recently (like one big electric train set), he wanted me to call out the Ronkonkoma, Long Island train station, in that sing-song way that the conductors do, while stressing the Ks: “RON KONKKK KOMA!! RON KONKKK KOMA!!” I am half asleep and yelling “RON KONKKK KOMA!” RON KONKKK KOMA!” It makes my head pound but my son’s delight makes it worthwhile.
No turning over and napping after this day’s version of morning cuddle. Coffee and aspirin. Antacids (for the burning caused by the coffee and aspirin). Repeat until fully conscious.
Once fully conscious, I turn on the TV to have, as Jon Stewart has said, my morning cup of sadness. Today, RAGE accompanies sadness. I blog my rant against Glenn Beck. I feel better.
I shower and dress. I even pack gym clothes. Wow, amazing what a morning’s expiation will do.
I eat lunch with an old friend with whom I have recently reconnected. We laugh all through lunch about everything and nothing and I feel like a weight is lifted. Laughter is the best antidote to life’s sadnesses and ills.
Drink a cup of laughter next time you have the opportunity.
I would also like to note that Rabbi David Saperstein gave my brother a job right out of college about 28 years ago in an organization with a mandate for social justice. Rabbi, you have been at it all these years. Thank you.
From CNN, August 11, 2009
Religious groups in favor of health care reform have launched a national campaign to offset the loud opposition to President Obama’s plan to overhaul the nation’s health care system, organizers announced.
“This is as much a crisis of faith as it is a crisis of health care,” said the Rev. John Hay Jr., senior pastor of West Morris Street Free Methodist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana.
“We just believe there is a better way.”
He and others spoke in a telephone news conference Monday announcing the campaign.
“As a pastor, I believe access to health care is a profoundly moral issue,” said the Rev. Stevie Wakes of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Kansas City, Kansas.
The campaign, called “40 days for Health Reform,” includes a national television advertisement, a “sermon weekend,” prayer meetings and a nationwide call-in with Obama on August 19, organizers said.
Prayer meetings emphasizing health care as a moral issue were taking place Tuesday in 45 cities across 18 states, organizers said. They expected about 4,000 people to participate.
“Healing and health are fundamental religious issues,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners, one of the sponsors of the campaign along with PICO National Network, Faith in Public Life, Faithful America and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.
Wallis stressed that participants in the campaign are not going to weigh in on particular policy questions. “It isn’t political in a partisan way,” he said. “This is a fundamental moral issue. … You’re going to hear the moral drumbeat of the faith community.”
Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who also spoke on the conference call, said the current system “doesn’t work for everyone.”
Other groups, such as the Christian Coalition of America and the Family Research Council, are strongly opposed to Democratic proposals to overhaul the health care system, saying, among other things, that they would lead to government-funded abortion.
“We don’t want abortion to enter this debate and sabotage health care reform,” Wallis said. He noted the legislation now being discussed on Capitol Hill is far from a final version.
Opponents of health care reform proposals have confronted U.S. lawmakers at town hall meetings in recent days, drawing heavy media attention with their boisterous protests.
I am sitting in a restaurant and there are nine loud girls and one guy celebrating one of the girls’ birthday. Rachel is her name. They are impossibly young, loud and full of energy. They are maybe two years out of college. I am transported back 22 years when a bunch of us lived in NYC post-college and we were similarly impossibly young, loud and full of energy. Instead of being annoyed, I am comforted by this scene. In my mind’s eye, I see OUR group of friends with mid-80s hairdos (one with especially puffy hair) and outfits (shoulder pads a la the TV Show, Dynasty).
I wouldn’t trade places with them for a second. The life I imagined for me back then bears no resemblance to the actual course of my life so far and I am happy for the difference.
And their possibilities are limited only by the passage of time and that is a hard and heart-breaking lesson. If I had one thing to tell these girls it would be : freeze your eggs (assuming the technology gets better) or freeze embryos. Time waits for no one. That’s years and years away and, yet, it goes so fast.
It seems like yesterday that I was 22 or 23. I still act about 12, which still makes me more mature than my 7 year-old but barely.
Life is beautiful. It just goes so fast.
Have fun, girls, and remember what I said.
It is your home and its value is that your kids or loved ones will inherit it (and make some money).
People who bought them as investment properties have lost them and some are homeless. If you want to be a house as an investment property, then buy a second home but you have to afford it like you do other investments, you use what you have and you don’t borrow.
My 7 year-old was sad this morning because we are redecorating the walls of his room and they are temporarily bare. “I don’t like my room anymore; it is so desolate,” he declares. I make a mental note to keep a dictionary by my bed. He wants to cuddle as usual before camp. (His version of cuddling requires fake sword fighting; fending off dangerous animals in the wild . . . . anything but what envisions as calm cuddling.) I had been up most of the night because some food didn’t agree with me and I have no energy. I sleep-walk through being a gemsbok protecting my young calf from some type of ferocious cat — cheetah, leopard, lion, tiger — I can’t remember these kind of details in the mornings. My son also announces he must be called by his full name or certain accepted nicknames because he is a grown-up boy now. I make a mental note to weep (when I am fully conscious) that my baby is growing up.
I am running late (which is ordinary) and need to hop a cab. The taxi driver engages me in conversation (because I have the word schmuck printed across my forehead). Then he says, “well let me tell you about me” (the point all along). He is a transgender woman-to-man from Bangladesh, having had the operations in India. Now he is on a roll. He tells me that he will marry his girlfriend when he has the final operation to extend the nerve further up his surgeon-made p*nis so he can have feeling. Aaaaaaaah. Toooooo muuuuuch infoooooo. Ok ok ok ok ok. I give him an extra tip for the cause.
It was not yet 10am and my day was already too eventful.
Oh, and my 80-something year old aunt believes the astroturfers. I make a mental note to tear my hair out once I take some aspirin to deaden the pain it will cause.
NICOSIA (Reuters) – Unhappy lovers in Cyprus have been taking so much stone from the tomb of Saint Agapitikos to use in love potions that soon there won’t be anything left.
Dust from the grave in the courtyard of the church in the village of Arodes in Paphos district has been used for centuries by the lovelorn, who are supposed to slip it into the drink of their objet d’amour.
But in recent years so many have been filching shards of stone that a quarter of the tomb has disappeared.
Mayor of Arodes Matthaios Stefanou is unclear whether Cypriots’ love lives are becoming more troubled.
“A lot of people have said it works,” he said. “In the last few years I don’t know what’s come over people, but they are flocking to the tomb for the stuff.
“Just the other day locals saw some people visiting the tomb, and they were there for a very long time, in the end they walked off with a huge chunk of stone, maybe even half a kilo of it!”
The island’s antiquities department has been called in to help. “The only thing we can do is examine the damage and try to prevent any further damage,” said Maria Hadjicosti, the acting director. Saint Agapitikos — whose name means “lover” — is believed to have served in the German army of the Crusaders before settling as a hermit in the area.
“You’re very welcome to come and see the tomb, but please don’t go taking any of it with you now,” Stefanou said.
(Reporting by Sarah Ktisti; editing by Andrew Roche)
The remnants of a family coping with the aftermath of the mother, intoxicated on booze and drugs, killing so many. It couldn’t be what the coroner said. It had to be something else. I get denial. But there is a weird twist to this. Politicians so often stand before the microphone and say specious things about a topic or issue. The fact that they speak it makes it true to some. Politicians create a “truth” irrespective of the facts all of the time. Isn’t that then what we as a society do when bad things happen? We don’t take responsibility, we don’t acknowledge the facts. We create a truth.
This family is wondering if they ever knew the person who caused this terrible loss of life. And, they are learning from our elected leaders that it is ok to hide behind a manufactured fact than face the hard realities.
The husband of the intoxicated woman who killed herself and seven others after driving the wrong way on the Taconic State Parkway said Friday that they carried the same bottle of vodka every weekend between their home and a campground during the summer.
Daniel Schuler, center, with his lawyer, Dominic A. Barbara, left, and Tom Ruskin, an investigator working for Mr. Schuler.
In doing so, he offered the first explanation of how his wife may have had access to alcohol on the morning of the crash, on July 26.
Tom Ruskin, an investigator who is working for the husband, Daniel Schuler, said that Mr. Schuler occasionally drank vodka and that his wife, Diane, was so frugal that she packed the same bottle of Absolut in a bag meant for trips between the family’s home in Suffolk County, on Long Island, and the camper in the Sullivan County campground they had frequented for the past three years. He said a single bottle could last a year for the Schulers.
But Mr. Ruskin said Mr. Schuler did not see the bottle that day, and was not sure whether his wife had packed the bottle in the bags he loaded into the minivan that Ms. Schuler drove from the campground. “He did not pack it, he did not see it,” Mr. Ruskin said. “As far as he knows, it is still in the camper, but I haven’t been up there and none of the investigative staff has checked it out as of yet.”
The authorities have said that Ms. Schuler, 36, of West Babylon, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.19 percent, more than twice the legal limit, and high levels of the chemical found in marijuana when she collided, head-on, about 1:35 p.m. with a Chevrolet TrailBlazer. Some days later, a broken Absolut vodka bottle was discovered under a seat in the minivan. Each revelation in the case has led to more questions about a crash that has left a riveted public uncomprehending of the tragedy: Ms. Schuler was killed, as was her daughter, Erin, 2; her three nieces, Emma, 8, Alyson, 7, and Kate, 5; and the three men in the TrailBlazer: Michael Bastardi, 81, his son, Guy Bastardi, 49, and a family friend, Daniel Longo, 74, all from Yonkers.
Mr. Schuler and his family have insisted that despite the toxicology findings, Diane Schuler rarely, if ever, drank, and that a medical problem must have had a role in the events of that day.
Mr. Ruskin said on Friday that phone records showed that four calls were logged on Ms. Schuler’s cellphone in the last hours of her life — two incoming calls and two outgoing ones.
He said that Ms. Schuler called her brother, Warren Hance, at 11:37 a.m., to say that she was in traffic, “running a bit late,” but that her nieces would be home in time for a scheduled performance rehearsal. At 12:08 p.m., Ms. Schuler received a call, but it is not yet known who made the call, Mr. Ruskin said.
Emma Hance called her father at 12:58 p.m. and said, “Daddy, there is something wrong with Aunt Diane and she is having trouble seeing and she is talking funny, she is slurring,” Mr. Ruskin said. That call was dropped after three minutes and Mr. Hance called back at 1:01 p.m., in a conversation that lasted nine minutes.
The authorities, who have recovered Ms. Schuler’s abandoned cellphone, will dig into the phone records as part of a criminal investigation by the New York State Police and the Westchester County district attorney’s office.
Law enforcement officials said on Friday that while misdemeanor charges could be brought if someone knowingly allowed a drunken driver to take off with children in a car, they did not expect to seek criminal charges against Mr. Schuler or Mr. Hance.
Still, the authorities said the criminal inquiry is continuing for two reasons: There is a public interest, since the crash occurred in daylight on a state parkway, and the families affected by the crash are in need of answers.
Lt. Dominick L. Chiumento of the State Police said that Mr. Hance was interviewed by investigators on Thursday, but that an interview of Mr. Schuler scheduled for that day did not occur. The lieutenant said that Mr. Schuler was not interviewed by the police on Friday and that investigators hoped to speak to him “as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile, investigators have spoken to people at a McDonald’s where Ms. Schuler stopped on her way home and determined “that there was no indication of any illness or impairment at the time she was there,” the State Police said in a statement. Ms. Schuler left the restaurant between 10:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m., the police said.
With the specter of possible civil liability hanging over the case, Mr. Schuler, through representatives, including his lawyer, Dominic A. Barbara, and Mr. Ruskin, has mounted a public effort to say that Ms. Schuler must have suffered some kind of medical crisis before the crash and that they are trying to find out what happened.
In conversations with the authorities before the release of the toxicology reports, Mr. Schuler told investigators that his wife had no health crises, according to one law enforcement official.
On Friday, Rosemary Guzzo, the daughter of Michael Bastardi, said her family was angered by what Mr. Schuler and his representatives said at a news conference on Thursday.
“I couldn’t even watch it, I had to walk outside the house,” said Ms. Guzzo. “It bothered me so much.”
The Westchester County medical examiner who produced the toxicology reports issued a statement Thursday standing by the findings and reaffirmed it on Friday.
The Schulers’ 5-year-old son, Bryan, survived the crash.