Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (269017)	1/18/2006 4:57:24 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 1572208

Absolutely, this law is sexist, whether intentional or unintentional is irrelevant, because the end-result is sexist. It's also discriminatory to any male that's undergoing a temporary medical handicap. :-) So the law is sexist against men and women? You really struggle with activism. Is that what you think you were doing? I read you mis-describing a law designed to prevent cheating on an exam as sexist, and being disgusted by its sexism. I didn't read any activism. I struggle with you, that's for sure! The fact the law exists is yet another example of why women need to make up 50% of this country's govt leadership. They are free to run for office like anyone else.

To: Amy J who wrote (269017)	1/19/2006 7:34:33 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1572208

Women's Place, Revisited The election on Sunday of Michelle Bachelet as Chile's president completes a three-continent long jump for women in politics. Ms. Bachelet is the first woman elected president in Latin America who is not the widow of a political strongman. On Monday, when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated as president of Liberia, she became Africa's first woman to be elected president. And with Angela Merkel's election as chancellor of Germany, a woman now leads Western Europe's most populous nation. Ms. Bachelet, a socialist, an agnostic and a single mother, won the presidency of Chile, Latin America's most socially conservative country, with the help of a compelling personal story. She is the daughter of an air force general who died in prison during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's rule after months of torture, and she herself was imprisoned and tortured. When she was named defense minister in the current government, she was put in charge of a military still very much shaped by Mr. Pinochet. She brought an unpretentious style to the post, and won a reputation for toughness without rancor. These new chief executives are not the first women to lead major democracies. Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Indira Gandhi of India were vastly powerful politicians and global ideological icons as well. Golda Meir was the inspirational leader of Israel, a nation surrounded by hostile Arab neighbors that refused to concede its right to exist. But the women's successes in Liberia, Chile and Germany are being celebrated in part because this kind of achievement is still rare. In most countries, women have yet to achieve the critical mass at the lower levels of government that will be necessary if their ascension is to be seen as part of the normal course of politics. The recent elections are important because they stand in stark contrast with the other route women have taken to power: picking up the standard of a murdered father or husband. Most of those dynastic women have brought few qualifications to the job and have been dreadful leaders. Mrs. Gandhi was an exception. She won office as the daughter of the independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, but transcended her status as a dynastic successor as a powerful - sometimes too powerful - leader. The women who are now leading nations are the most independent and accomplished group of female leaders ever collected - with the possible exception of when Elizabeth I dined alone. Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

To: Amy J who wrote (269017)	1/21/2006 4:16:23 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572208

When my mother was dying, had a week or so to live, her doctors refused to give her effective pain killers because she would get "addicted". Fortunately, we had Hospice, and they wouldn't take no for an answer, and our family ended up spending some quality time with my mother in her last days and last hours... Party of Pain By JOHN TIERNEY As the baby boomers age, more and more Americans will either be enduring chronic pain or taking care of someone in pain. The Republican Party has been reaching out to them with a two-step plan: 1. Do not give patients medicine to ease their pain. 2. If they are in great pain and near death, do not let them put an end to their misery. The Republicans have been so determined to become the Pain Party that they've brushed aside their traditional belief in states' rights. The Bush administration wants lawyers in Washington and federal prosecutors with no medical training to tell doctors how to treat patients. As attorney general, John Ashcroft decided that Oregon's law allowing physician-assisted suicide violated the federal Controlled Substances Act because he didn't consider this use of drugs to be a "legitimate medical purpose." Karen Tandy, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, has been using this same legal theory to decree how doctors should medicate patients with pain, and those who disagree with her medical judgment can be sent to prison. You know Republicans have lost their bearings when they need a lesson in states' rights from Janet Reno, who considered the Oregon law when she was attorney general. For the federal government to decide what constituted legitimate medicine, she wrote, would wrongly "displace the states as the primary regulators of the medical profession." The Supreme Court agreed with her this week in upholding the Oregon law. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the federal drug law did not empower the attorney general "to define general standards of medical practice." It merely "bars doctors from using their prescription-writing powers as a means to engage in illicit drug dealing and trafficking as conventionally understood." That's news to the D.E.A. and the federal prosecutors, who have gone way beyond any "conventionally understood" idea of drug trafficking. They've been prosecuting doctors for prescribing painkillers like OxyContin, even where there's no evidence of any of the drugs being resold on the streets. It doesn't matter that the doctor genuinely believed that the patient needed the drugs and was not abusing them. It doesn't matter that the patient was in pain. No, doctors are now going to prison merely for prescribing more pain pills than the D.E.A. and prosecutors deem a "legitimate medical purpose." These drug warriors are not troubled by the enormous range in the level of pain medication that different patients need. They don't even seem to worry much about the potency of the pills, just the number. They want enough pills of any dosage to make a good photo at a press conference. In some cases, doctors have been too careless or gullible, but those are offenses to be disciplined by state medical authorities, not criminal courts. Tandy claims that only a few corrupt doctors have anything to fear from the D.E.A. She responded to a column of mine last year by saying that her agency had investigated only 0.1 percent of the 600,000 doctors in the U.S. But she was far too modest. Most doctors, after all, write few if any prescriptions for opioid painkillers. The doctors who matter are the small number of specialists in pain treatment who prescribe opioids. Ronald Libby, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida, estimates that 17 percent of those doctors were investigated during one year by the D.E.A., and an even greater number of others were investigated by local and state authorities, typically in concert with the drug agency. That means a pain specialist might have a one-in-three chance of being investigated for prescribing opioids. Faced with those odds, doctors are understandably afraid. As noted in The New England Journal of Medicine this month, the D.E.A. has made doctors reluctant to give opioids to desperately ill patients, even when these drugs are the most effective pain treatment. The article warned that a victory for the Bush administration in the Oregon case, besides affecting terminally ill patients in Oregon, could cause doctors across the country to "abandon patients and their families in their moment of greatest need." The Supreme Court's decision is a victory for patients and their doctors - including, I hope, some of the ones in prison for violating the federal legal theory that has now been rejected by the court. The doctors should go free, and Republicans in the White House and Congress should restrain the drug warriors who locked them up. When this year's budget is drawn up, it's the D.E.A.'s turn to feel pain. Copyright 2006The New York Times Company