The late President Gerald Ford grew up when college football was played with leather helmets, and years later critics snidely sniped that’s how he got to be “soft in the head.” Then there’s Richard Aaron York III, who on Sunday, August 15, 2022, smashed a car into a concrete [...]
Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
The unintended consequences of hasty abortion bans
I grew up in a conservative community, and as a juvenile, my political thinking was conservative, too. Not just because everyone around me thought that way, but because conservatives’ black-and-white worldview seemed to make everything clear and simple: There’s right vs. wrong, good vs. [...]
August 8th, 2022 - 5:02 pm § in Health
Did Covid-19 turn America into a nation of alcoholics?
A lot of Americans apparently picked up boozing habits while stuck in their homes during the pandemic, according to the Daily Mail, a U.K.-based tabloid (see story here). Their source is vaguely-described studies. One of these showed “at-home drinking ‘spiked’ in 2020 and held strong in 20[...]
Heat danger and federal law
“Excessive heat has been the leading weather-related killer in America for 30 years,” Huffington Post says. “Getting sick because of heat is an unfortunately common risk.” But workers have little legal protection if employers fire them for refusing to work in dangerously hot [...]
Live “red” and die
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, the link between politics and health became glaringly obvious,” Scientific American says (read article here). But death rates were already higher in red counties before the pandemic. See chart below. You don’t have to guess that Republicans are bad fo[...]
July 13th, 2022 - 2:30 pm § in Health, Law and Courts
Ohio denied abortion to 10-year-old victim; GOPers disputed it happened
This story has been updated. “A 10-year-old child abuse victim was forced to seek an abortion in Indiana after her home state of Ohio barred abortion following the Supreme Court decision to overturn of Roe v. Wade,” the Daily Mail, a U.K.-based tabloid, said in a story published on F[...]
When ideology trumps health
We saw that happen when Republicans defied health experts and went their own deadly way on Covid-19. On abortion, too, Republicans are sacrificing decency, compassion, and common sense to dogma. In an opinion piece at NBC News (read it here), a law professor diagnosed with breast cancer wrote, R[...]
How Biden could have prevented high gas prices
He couldn’t have prevented the years of low oil prices and cheap gas that gutted oil company profits. (For example, Exxon’s profit dropped from $32.5 billion in 2014 to $7.8 billion in 2018, and the company lost $22.4 billion in 2020.) That was engineered by Saudi Arabia to kill off the [...]
Florida doctor kicked off state board for advocating kids get Covid shots
Dr. Lisa Gwynn (photo, left), a pediatrician and med school prof, is president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (profile here). She also was a director of Florida Healthy Kids Corporation, a state health insurance provider, until she was fired from that board on Wednesday[...]
June 23rd, 2022 - 12:25 pm § in Health
Fake abortion clinics lure women to inflict anti-abortion propaganda
Google’s search engine sending women to these fake clinics is causing an uproar; watch video below. At least 50 of these deceptive clinics operate in Washington State; see story here. The women who visit these clinics are told “that birth control doesn’t work, that abortion dooms them [...]