Archive for category powerful women
When History Calls, a love story
Posted by zoboxrox in health, politics, powerful women on October 15th, 2009
I would like to just start off here by giving my girl Olympia Snowe [seriously great name] a big one up for growing a pair. I’m pretty sure she and I live by the same motto, which, though basic and commercialized, I’ve found tends to work out in the long run: DO THE RIGHT THING.
Inevitably, we will not remember this moment as fondly as we do today, if she changes her mind in the next few months, but I’d like to point out that, unlike, I’d say, the majority of her colleagues, she made a lot of sense when she finally opened her mouth:
When history calls, history calls. And I happen to think that the consequences of inaction dictate the urgency of Congress to take every opportunity to demonstrate its capacity to solve the monumental issues of our time
I want one of those little tape recorders!!
In other words: how will we face our children and our children’s children if we don’t do this now, when things have gotten so bad, that if we do nothing, we will always be remembered for our failure to act? You know what Olympia, I happen to agree with you.
Secondly, I’d like to offer one piece of truth I imagine would be recognized if it was pondered by anyone with the capacity for understanding: the health care system, in its entirety — from insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies to private hospitals to ERs, ORs, ICUs, OBGYNs, etc.– should be a NON-FOR-PROFIT enterprise. And let me tell you why… (you knew I was going to):
1. There will never not be doctors
There have always been doctors. And, I can say from my own experience with them, both the doctors who have treated me and those I know personally, they’re really not in it for the money. Part of the Hippocratic oath reads: “Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption.”
While they can look scary, they tend to be pretty decent, unselfish people. That which is driving doctors to leave their profession is not their pay, but instead their inability to treat their patients the way they would like to if they were free of the restrictions brought on by insurance companies. Ex. “No, we won’t cover that life-saving medication.” Which brings me to point two.
2. Medicine, as a science, will never advance without large scale access, in both directions
I was reading about the phony “insurance industry report” recently released by, lets face it, the bad guys, which stated something along the lines of “premiums to reach $4000/month under Bacaus plan.” While we’re obviously not the most empathetic country in the world, I’m not sure we’re ready to reach a point when less than a quarter of our population has health care. Not only is wrong, but it is also against the natural progression of medicine, which requires new patients with unique cases in order to grow.
And guess who gets irritated when they don’t have a massive population to sell their overpriced drugs to?
3. We all need each other in order to make this work in the end
The truth is, while they currently have all the say in the relationship, without access to professional health care and FDA approved medications, people will find another way — it is in our nature to do so; it is, perhaps, the greatest genius of our species — and Big Pharma will lose control of the court. And pharmaceutical companies need a large population of people on their medications in order to sustain themselves. Why do you think they advertise so aggressively?
You don’t have to talk to your doctor about these drugs, they already know about them! And they know if you should be on them or not. But Pharma continues to advertise because Pharma needs us to keep buying their drugs, and they need scientists to keep producing them. Likewise, the insurance industry needs doctors to accept their plans, which many have stopped doing, and in turn, needs us to buy into them. If anyone stopped for a second and realized how well this could work if it ran the way it ought to… maybe instead of changing the practices, we just have to remove the people currently practicing them.
ELIMINATE GREED FROM HEALTH CARE: THERE IS NO ROOM FOR IT IN TRUE MEDICINE
“Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity”
Hippocrates, c. 400 BC
Surgeon General’s Warning
Posted by zoboxrox in health, politics, powerful women, science on July 14th, 2009
Yesterday Obama nominated Dr. Regina Benjamin of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, to be his new Surgeon General, and while the position is more or less a symbolic one, his choice highlights his thoughts on the nations health, and perhaps the direction he hopes to take the entire health care system.
Whats interesting, and at the same time predictable, about his choice, is that here is a woman of color who comes out of the same meritocratic system as the President himself (as well as his choice for the Supreme Court). In this way, unlike someone who came from privilege and never needed any help, Dr. Benjamin feels she owes the system, and has dedicated her life to helping others — NOT to cashing in on her skills and experience. In fact, the New York Times quotes her current employer as saying they are currently $300,000.00 in debt to her, because she hasn’t received payment for years.
Mr. Obama’s signature domestic policy goal is reforming the nation’s health care system to make doctors more accessible to the tens of millions of people without insurance. He picked someone who has spent her entire career tending to the poor and the uninsured, sometimes accepting pints of oysters as payment.
It was Dr. Benjamin’s willingness to sacrifice — something health care reform may ask of many more doctors — that Mr. Obama discussed at length Monday.
Dr. Benjamin, Mr. Obama said, “represents what’s best about health care in America — doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients.”
On top of her qualifications as a doctor and an advocate for the poor and uninsured, she also comes from the land of disaster AKA the Gulf Coast (perhaps most memorably Hurricane Katrina), and has a lot of experience with emergency health situations — an incredible tool for the job of Surgeon General. Her own clinic in Bayou La Batre, which she built in a shrimping town 25 miles south of Mobile, Alabama, has been destroyed and rebuilt three times, twice due to hurricanes, and once to fire. 
She has an intimate knowledge of tragedy and early loss, as she has been personally affected by what she considers, “preventable diseases”: her mother’s death from lung cancer due to smoking, her father’s death from high blood pressure and diabetes due to diet, and finally her brother’s death from HIV due to lifestyle. In other words, she understands what’s killing Americans — its happened right in front of her eyes, both in her home, and in the clinic where she serves thousands of people, sometimes at cost to herself.
Here are some awesome facts about her from her Wikipedia page:
- In 1998 she was the United States recipient of the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights
- Dr. Benjamin was named by Time Magazine as one of the “Nation’s 50 Future Leaders Age 40 and Under.” She has been featured in a New York Times article, “Angel in a White Coat,” and was chosen “Person of the Week” by ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, “Woman of the Year” by CBS This Morning, and “Woman of the Year” by People Magazine. She was also featured on the December 1999 cover of Clarity Magazine and received the 2000 National Caring Award, which was inspired by Mother Teresa.
- In 2006, she was awarded the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by Pope Benedict XVI.
- In 2008, Benjamin was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report.
- In September, she was one of 25 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards,” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Say It Ain’t Sonia
Posted by zoboxrox in justice, politics, powerful women on May 26th, 2009
If you had asked me a month ago who the next Supreme would be, I would have said Sonia Sotomayor, without question. She was afterall, the only candidate offered who fulfilled both the need for an additional female to the highest court and the strong desire for a Hispanic justice. There is no question on whether or not she is qualified: having attended Princeton University and Yale Law; having worked as a prosecutor for the New York District Attorney and a partner at the private commercial litigation firm of Pavia & Harcourt, where she specialized in intellectual property litigation; having been appointed a federal judge by a republican, Bush Sr., in 1991 to sit on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then in 1997 receiving a nomination from a democrat, Clinton (William), to the seat she now holds as a jurist in the elite U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In other words, she fit the job requirements.
Its just… she was so obvious. In a world of safe choices, Obama has made a number of relatively risky ones (Biden, Geithner) and he never seemed to be intimidated by the status quo into doing the obvious. I just assumed he would completely surprise us. But the more I think about Sotomayor the less obvious she becomes. I’m a born and bred New York City gal and I can tell you from personal experience, there’s nothing ordinary or boring about a strong Latina from the South Bronx.
Additionally, she is considered a moderate liberal, and while she’s not exactly an activist, appointing her to the Supreme Court won’t cause the shake-up her predecessor, the wonderfully strange and suprising David Souter, did when he failed to appease the Right after his nomination by Bush (41).
She is liberal…..Liberal without being a flaming type of do-gooder or anything of the sort. To call her a centrist would not be accurate. To call her wild-eyed would also not be accurate. She is far too rational, far too interested in the underlying facts.
So in this way, while she’s safe for Obama to nominate politically, as she fills the double need for a Hispanic and a woman, she is also safe for progessive causes, such a gay marriage and equal rights, and thereby satisfies his base as well. She is strengthened by the fact that she is completely qualified and also socially necessary. Unless they want to lose the Hispanic and female vote completely, the GOP will have a hard time rejecting her nomination.
In a move that seemed so simple and obvious at first, Obama has once again displayed his cunning and savy political mind.
Meet Jane Brody
Posted by zoboxrox in health, powerful women on April 2nd, 2009
If you are ever going to die, Jane Brody is someone about whom you should know. And while no one likes to talk about dying, especially when it comes to one’s own inevitable, yet sometimes unimaginable death, Mrs. Brody has gotten as good as it gets. So good, in fact, that she wrote an entire book, Jane Brody’s Guide to the Great Beyond dedicated to the subject in order to try to help out the rest of us.
This past Wednesday evening, March 25th, Jansen Hospice and Palliative Care, The O Silas Foundat
ion, and Westchester Jewish Community Services came together to sponsor “An Evening with Jane Brody” at the Heimbold Auditorium at Sarah Lawrence College. The event was organized by Westchester End-of-Life Coalition with Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Program in Health Advocacy to promote her newest book, which Brody refers to as: A Practical Primer to Help You and Your Loved Ones Prepare Medically, Legally, and Emotionally for the End of Life. Local doctor Joseph Sacco, who’s specialty is Palliative Care, was there as a discussant.
As peculiar as it may seem, with impending death as the topic of discussion, the evening was delightful and Brody and Sacco proved to be a compatible and comedic pair. Mixed in with personal anecdotes, both hilarious and tragic, Brody outlined some of the advice she offers the book: insisting her audience ensure they have a medical proxy, suggesting hospice care as opposed to intrusive and often painful life-prolonging medical procedures, and, perhaps most importantly, reminding us that it is ok to talk about death and dying, even when its an uncomfortable thing to do.
“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best,” she told us. Pretty sound advice, and applicable to many areas of life, not just its final stage.
Barbie v. Barbara Bush; Best Week Ever: 3/3-3/10
Posted by zoboxrox in economy, health, human rights, international, malfunction, military, politics, powerful women, religion, tragedy on March 10th, 2009
1. Obama reverses Bush’s ridiculous Stem Cell funding restriction; I shudder to think of what they will say about us one hundred years from now.
“In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research — and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.” Obama, 03.09.08
I like to think of myself a realist, and the sad fact that people get sick and die should never change; c’est la vie, as they say. But considering the amount of unnecessary and unnatural spinal cord and brain injuries that have been inflicted on our young soldiers in the past five years, I’d say at this point we owe them at the very least the effort. 
According to Current, the move is more than just a single incident; it is an entire policy change in the way our Government interacts with our Scientists. In fact, what is so ironic about the partisan divide over the issue is, by passing the second half of the resolution, Obama is actually limiting the scope of government: this is, by definition, a conservative idea, which should appeal to the Libertarian views of true Republicans, but is lost upon the ridiculous argument of life at conception.
“Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident,” said Obama. “They result from painstaking and costly research — from years of lonely trial and error, much of which never bears fruit — and from a government willing to support that work.”
The order is part of a broader declaration on science that will guide the administration’s policies on matters ranging from renewable energy to climate change.
“This order is an important step in advancing the cause of science in America. But let’s be clear: promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it is also about protecting free and open inquiry,” said the president. “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient.”
2. Speaking of medical miracles, Obama also began his health care summit this past week, despite the fact he currently lacks an HHS Secretary, Surgeon General, and Health Care Czar. This fact was overshadowed, however, by Ted Kennedy’s return to Washington (since his collapse at Obama’s inauguration in January) and another history book speech by our President.
Each of us must accept that none of us will get everything that we want, and that no proposal for reform will be perfect. If that’s the measure, we will never get anything done.
But when it comes to addressing our health care challenge, we can no longer let the perfect be the enemy of the essential. And I don’t think anybody would argue that we are on a sustainable path when it comes to health care.
Finally, I want to be very clear, at the outset, that, while everybody has a right to take part in this discussion, nobody has the right to take it over and dominate.
The status quo is the one option that’s not on the table, and those who seek to block any reform at all, any reform at any costs, will not prevail this time around.
Meanwhile, Barbara Bush has a valve in her heart replaced with that of a pig… too easy…
3. Unemployment rate at 8.1%, 25 year high. The Dow continues to drop. People all over the world panic. I have no stocks, no job, and no equity, so my life has remained more or less the same, but apparently, this is bad news. 10% rate predicted by Spring 2010.
4. Obama begins his overhaul of the education System; No Child Left Behind finally behind us. 
We have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short and other nations outpace us. The time for finger-pointing is over. The time for holding ourselves accountable is here. The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy and unacceptable for our children, and we cannot afford to let it continue… I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time. We don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.
5. Barbie turns 50. Mirrors all over the world shatter.
Rush Limbaugh, DFL: “De Facto Leader” or “Dumb Fat Loser”?
Posted by zoboxrox in malfunction, politics, powerful women on March 6th, 2009
Now my eight year old cousin tells me its a horrible thing to call someone stupid, and while she’s right and I try to avoid pettiness for the most part, I just had to get something off my chest: Rush Limbaugh is one of the most disgusting human beings alive!! How could he possibly be the spokesperson for Conservatives: the family party, the righteous, the holy? Do they know anything about him?
Here’s some bio info, which you can find easily on the Internet, but which apparently has gone un-remembered during the recent weeks in which Limbaugh has been called the de-facto leader of the Republican Party. While repubes themselves don’t agree, he has managed to reinvent himself as an actual, potentially powerful political figure. So here are some… whats the word… hypocrisies, which I think define Limbaugh pretty well:
1. Young Rush was born in a little town in Missouri, the bell-weather state, called Cape Girardeau, where his family had been prominent, well-to-do, and politically active and conservative for many generations. Despite the pressure of success placed on the young Limbaugh, and the many opportunities he had as the son, grandson, and nephew of many successful lawyers and judges, Rush had no interest in education, and failed out of college after two semesters. In the words of his mother he “flunked everything,” including his modern ballroom dancing class. I feel kind of bad for Rush at this point in his life. Despite the fact that he looks much, much, much cooler back then, knowing what I know about Rush I certainly wouldn’t choose this guy as my dancing partner… would you?
2. Despite his lack of class, intelligence, any appeal whatsoever education, Rush broke out in the radio world in 1988, a year after Ronald Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine which required “the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was (in the Commission’s view) honest, equitable and balanced.“ It was only after this repeal that Limbaugh was able to take off; only after fairness no longer became a reasonable expectation, did Rush become a national phenomenon. He now makes approximately $30 million a year. Talk about fair…
3. He is known for his outward racism, chauvinism, and general bigotry. It must have been hard as hell for the world’s biggest vagina Michael Steele, who is apparently Black, to call Rush up and apologize to him, knowing what he knows about Rush’s past episodes with racism.
Further slips of the tongue include a recent suggestion to name the current health care reform, the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill, suggesting the imminent death of the cancer-struck senator from Massachusetts.
He is highly critical of the Feminist Movement, saying, “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” He is also responsible for the term Feminazi, which he describes as a woman who’s life is centered around ensuring as many abortions as possible occur (I swear, I’m not making this up).
And perhaps most offensively, in the 90s, when national HIV rates were on the rise and stigma surrounded the disease, he was known to play Dionne Warick’s song “I know I’ll Never Love this Way Again,” preceding stories about people living with AIDS.
4. He has been married three times. Isn’t that, like, not allowed in the conservative movement? Doesn’t that destroy the sanctity of marriage?
5. He’s a Drug Addict and Doctor Shopper. Doesn’t anyone remember this?!
Rush Limbaugh and prosecutors in the long-running prescription fraud case against him have reached a deal calling for the only charge against the conservative commentator to be dropped without a guilty plea if he continues treatment, his attorney said Friday.
Limbaugh turned himself in to authorities on a warrant filed Friday charging him with fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Jail. He and his attorney Roy Black left about an hour later, after Limbaugh was photographed and fingerprinted and he posted $3,000 bail, Barbera said.
Prosecutors’ three-year investigation of Limbaugh began after he publicly acknowledged being addicted to pain medication and entered a rehabilitation program. They accused Limbaugh of “doctor shopping,” or illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions, after learning that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion.
Please, someone explain to me how this man could ever possibly be mistaken as the leader of anything, except for maybe the gravy train?
Sarah Palin Hates Me… and You and You and You
Posted by zoboxrox in malfunction, politics, powerful women on January 13th, 2009
Sarah Palin is obviously on her period this week. The Mama Bear has not been happy lately, and she has been letting us know. For some reason, she’s still getting national attention, and has recently lashed out at a number of liberal elites including, but not limited to, Katie Couric, Tina Fey, Caroline Kennedy, and, believe it or not, yours truly! That’s right, Sarah’s newest enemy number one are “bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers,” among whom I will go ahead and include myself. Here’s a little clip from an interview that made its way onto the internets earlier this week.
Unfortunately for everyone involved in the recent Republican campaign, it turns out Sarah Palin isn’t a total moron afterall. Unless someone wrote a script for her and held up every word spelled out phonetically, she has a much more extensive vocabulary than anyone had ever realized. There, I said something nice about her! See Sarah, we’re not all bad. We just dont like liars!
…if you are in any way still interested in the weird lies of Sarah Palin, and haven’t yet figured out what the hell happened last year, this email exchange published yesterday between Pat Dougherty, editor of the great Anchorage Daily News, and governor Palin, is fascinating. For some reason, governor Palin fired off an email to the editor furious that the ADN had run an AP story that stated that her kinda-son-in-law was a high school drop-out. It’s classic Palin: she insists that Levi Johnston is not a high school drop-out, even though, in the actual world the rest of us live in, he is.
Cabinet Spotlight: Hillary Clinton, the Early Years.
Posted by zoboxrox in politics, powerful women on December 17th, 2008
Because I myself don’t know a whole lot about some of the people being nominated to run our country, I’ve decided to do a series of spotlights on the new Cabinet members, and who better to start with than our gal Hillary. Now Hil’s a complicated figure, as many people know, and she definitely shakes things up wherever she goes. Both adored and despised, she is one of the strongest — but also most divisive — leaders of the Democratic Party. I think a lot of the criticism is unfair, however, and in this post I hope to show why it is Hillary should be defined by what she has done, not as a woman, but as an independent thinker with an innate understanding of human rights.
Hillary Diane 
Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, which makes her a Scorpio (quite appropriately). Raised in a conservative Methodist home in the suburbs of Chicago, Hillary was successful from an early age: as a brownie, as a girl scout, as a student, as an athlete, as a student council member, as a National Merit Scholar, and most ironically, as an active and outspoken young Republican. She was pretty (despite popular belief), smart, talented, gracious, and, most of all, ambitious. She fit the young Republican image perfectly 
and in 1960 and 1964 even volunteered for her party’s election efforts.
She was also, however, inevitably attracted to the atmosphere of change of the early 1960s. In 1962 Hillary was able to meet Martin Luther King, whose subsequent assassination later contributed to Hilary’s political transformation. This seems to have been the first turning point in her political career.
By the time she was a senior at the prestigious all-girls Wellesley College, she had been elected (and then later rejected) President of the Young Republicans Club, interned in Washington, organized student rights movements, attended the Republican National Convention of 1968, abandoned the party of her birth and become a radical, and had written a thesis controversial enough the White House felt the need to suppress it when she became First Lady. In 1969, after popular demand from the student body, she became the first graduating senior to ever give the commencement address at her Wellesley, during which she took the opportunity to criticize Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken to the class earlier in the ceremony. 
While at Yale Law School, 
Hillary became interested in early childhood development and children’s law, an area that was only beginning to gain recognition at the time. It is also during this period in her life that Hillary met her future husband, William Jefferson Clinton, fellow law student and activist. Independently, however, she was making a name for herself. Over the course of her time at Yale, Hillary had: volunteered her efforts giving free legal advice to the poor, served on the Board of Editors of Yale Law Review and Social Action, interned with children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman, assisted on the seminal work Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, received a grant to work for Senator Walter Mondale’s Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, and campaigned in Texas for Democratic nominee George McGovern. By her graduation in 1973, Hillary had accomplished more in her young life than I will most likely ever achieve. It was the decisions she made over the next few years, however, that inevitably defined her.
The White House Website has the following information on the seven years between 1973 and 1980:
After graduation, Hillary advised the Children’s Defense Fund in
Cambridge and joined the impeachment inquiry staff advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. After completing those responsibilities, she “followed her heart to Arkansas,” where Bill had begun his political career.
They married in 1975. She joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas Law School in 1975 and the Rose Law Firm in 1976. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, and Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas. Their daughter, Chelsea, was born in 1980.
The website Political Base has a perhaps more accurate description of the times:
By 1974, Hillary Clinton was seen as someone with a potentially very bright political
future. She had served as staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children following her graduation from Yale. In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff for the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal, ending in the resignation of President Nixon in August 1974. Passing the Arkansas, but not the D.C., bar exam, Hillary followed Bill to Arkansas and the couple became faculty at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville School of Law… As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary (who adopted “Clinton” during her husbands re-election bid in 1982 as an appeal to voters)…
It is said that Bill proposed marriage many times to Hillary, but she repeatedly refused. It seems fairly obvious that she has never been very willing to relinquish her own political identity to assume the role of politician’s wife, but I think it became clear during her role as First Lady that, more than anything, Hillary is a populist at heart. Her goal is not one of power, but instead one of action.
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