Month: April 2014

Let’s really make her suffer, shall we?

by digby

I sure hope that all breast feeding moms understand that if they ingest something that harms their baby, even by accident, they will be held legally liable.

A judge sentenced a South Carolina woman to 20 years in prison Friday for killing her 6-week-old daughter with what prosecutors say was an overdose of morphine delivered through her breast milk.

A prosecutor said Stephanie Greene, 39, was a nurse and knew the dangers of taking painkillers while pregnant and breast feeding, instead choosing to conceal her pregnancy from doctors so she could keep getting her prescriptions. She lost her nursing license in 2004 for trying to get drugs illegally.

Greene’s lawyer said she was only trying to stop debilitating pain from a car crash more than a decade before and relied on her own judgment and medical research on the Internet instead of the advice of doctors and is still overwhelmed with grief from the loss of her child.

The 20-year sentence was the minimum after a Spartanburg County jury found Greene guilty of homicide by child abuse Friday. She could have faced up to life behind bars. Greene will have to serve 16 years before she is eligible for parole. She said nothing in court and quietly shuffled out of the courtroom, her hands and feet shackled, after she was sentenced.

Her lawyer said she will appeal and it’s likely the case will be tied up for years to come. Both the prosecutor and Greene’s lawyer agree no mother has ever been prosecuted in the United States for killing her child through a substance transmitted in breast milk. Also, prosecutors didn’t prove how the baby got the morphine and there is little scientific evidence that enough morphine can gather in breast milk to kill an infant, Greene’s lawyer Rauch Wise said.

“The court can’t punish her any more than she already has been by losing a child,” Wise said.

Greene’s husband did not talk to reporters. Wise said he supported his wife and was devastated as he prepared to raise their 7-year-old son alone.

This case is a tragedy on so many levels, but it’s not based on verified science. People just “know” apparently that she “killed” her baby by taking painkillers. Someday they might just “know” that eating or drinking unapproved substances harmed a nursing baby too. Who can say?

What kind of people are this who would punish this woman so harshly for such a tragedy? But then, we routinely throw people in jail for 20 years for drugs all the time, so I guess my point is moot. I’m going to guess that’s what she’s really being punished for. Since when did people care much about what happens to babies once they’re born?

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QOTD: Bill McKibbon

by digby

Via Upworthy :

From his lips …

If you’d like to see a few candidates who have the right priorities, you can donate to  Blue America House candidates and Blue America Senate candidates. They get it.

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We’re just nuts

by digby

Tom Tomorrow says it all:

It’s not that they’re rich, it’s that they’re insanely rich

by digby

This Letter to the Editor makes the point I’ve been trying to make for years now. It’s the sheer vastness of their wealth that makes the difference:

To the Editor:

Re “Justices, 5-4, Void Key Spending Cap in Political Races” (front page, April 3):

There is a deep connection between the old news about the rapidly growing wealth gap in this country and the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday striking down the longstanding and regularly reaffirmed aggregate limits on how much an individual can give to candidates.

It has always been the case in this country that there have been rich people — quite a few of them. These were people who could afford to send their children to private schools and colleges, they had nice houses — maybe a vacation home — perhaps a housekeeper. They certainly led different lives from ordinary middle-class and working-class people, but they lived on the same planet.

Yet with today’s income distribution there are many people with personal wealth of over half a billion dollars and quite a few billionaires. Those people do indeed inhabit a different planet from the rest of us. And for them, the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelsons and George Soroses, spending $3.6 million every two years in federal elections, as the Supreme Court decision would allow, is literally inconsequential.

If we must be governed by those whom the billionaires choose to fund, then the social contract really has been ruptured. And it is only the five Pollyannas on the Supreme Court who would have us believe that those who have unlimited cash to spend on elections will not call the tune.

Why else, after all, would the superrich spend their money on candidates instead of buying another Damien Hirst pickled sheep?

CHARLES FRIED
Cambridge, Mass., April 3, 2014

The writer, a professor of law at Harvard and solicitor general under President Reagan, filed a brief in this case supporting aggregate limits.

This is an old story on this blog, I know.  But I continue to think it’s important to point out that when you have 75 billion dollars as the Koch Brothers do, you could spend a million dollars in every House race and it wouldn’t even make a tiny dent in their fortunes.

One more time, here’s the perspective:

The Koch’s have 75 billion.

Here’s another little illustration that brings home the point:

Republican presidential hopefuls may be worried about how many millions casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson will give to their 2016 campaigns, but the money means little to the GOP super donor.

In the two days since he hosted the Republican Jewish Coalition’s meeting with several possible 2016 Republican candidates at his Venetian Resort and Hotel, Adelson personally made $2.1 billion — 21 times the $100 million he reported giving away during the 2012 presidential election.

Politics is an inexpensive hobby for these people.

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Feature not bug

by digby

This is working out well for the anti-abortion zealots. It’s not that women are no longer getting abortions. But they are suffering a lot more. And perhaps that’s the point:

A Huffington Post survey last year found that since 2010, at least 54 abortion providers across 27 states had either closed or stopped performing the procedure. Sixteen more shut their doors after Texas lawmakers passed some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country last summer. A federal appeals court upheld two of the new restrictions in a ruling last week.

As a result, researchers and women’s health advocates say, women today are resorting to many of the same dangerous methods they relied on in the pre-Roe era: seeking out illegal abortion providers, as Karen Hulsey did, or attempting risky self-abortion procedures.

In 2014, four decades after the Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to choose, pregnant women once again find themselves crossing the border to Mexico and haunting back-alleys in search of medical care.

Of course they are. There was never any doubt that this would happen. Women will get abortions. There is no stopping it. The only question is whether they will endanger their health or die getting them.

Read the whole story, it’s devastating. I can hardly believe this is happening in 2014. I was a young teen when Roe was first decided. And I’m pretty old now. Never let anyone say that you can’t go backwards. Even with all the pharmacological and medical advances, I’m seeing it happen in my own lifetime.

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John Boehner uses Fort Hood incident as an excuse to attack the VA

by David Atkins

This from the Republican leadership takes some serious shameless chutzpah:

House Speaker John Boehner today expressed condolences for the victims of the latest Fort Hood shooting and said Congress should explore ways to better prevent mentally ill people from acquiring firearms, as investigators continue to probe the mental history of the alleged gunman.

“There’s no question that those with mental health issues should be prevented from owning weapons or being able to purchase weapons,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said at a news conference. “We need to continue to look at to find a way to keep weapons out of the hands of people who should not have them.”
Authorities identified Army Spc. Ivan Lopez as the shooter who killed three people and wounded 16 others on Wednesday before committing suicide.

Lopez, who officials say had deployed to Iraq for four months but never saw combat, was reportedly being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Boehner said Congress has begun to address mental illness by funding “a pilot project addressing mental health issues and weapons” as part of the Medicare Doc Fix, which just passed Congress and is awaiting the president’s final authorization.

That program establishes an eight-state demonstration program for a two-year period authorizing $1.1 billion as an incentive to community mental health providers to offer a broad range of mental health issues, according to a senior Republican leadership aide.
But even after President Obama signs that bill, Boehner conceded, many veterans still are not getting all the support they need.

Boehner joined several veterans service organizations to call on Congress to pass the Department of Veteran Affairs Management Accountability Act of 2014, which aims at improving transparency and increasing accountability by granting the secretary new authorization to fire senior executive officials within the department.
“For our active-duty members, they ought to have access to high-quality care, just like what we’re asking for those who are now veterans,” Boehner said. “What we’re trying to do here, though, is focus in on the serious problems at the Veterans Administration. We’re spending $160 billion a year of taxpayers’ money, and it ought to be spent wisely to help those who’ve worn our uniform.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who has sponsored a companion bill in the Senate, said “all Americans deserve and expect a government that’s both accountable and effective.”

“The enormous and vast majority of the 300,000 men and women who work in this agency work hard and do a great job, but like any organization there’s going to be breakdowns,” he said. “And when there are, people need to be held accountable, especially at the senior management level.”

In a statement, the VA strongly opposed the legislation, and contended it already has sufficient power to make personnel decisions.

No one would say the VA is perfect. But let’s be very clear here.

The VA correctly identified and was treating an individual for depression. Individuals suffering from mental illness are allowed to purchase firearms. An individual explicitly being treated for mental illness by the VA purchased a firearm and went on a murder-suicide rampage.

The GOP reaction to this is to mouth platitudes about guns and mental illness that they intend to do exactly nothing to address, while pivoting to attacks on the VA and employment protections for government workers.

Based on what we know now, nothing about this incident was the fault of the VA. They were treating the individual in question, but no treatment can guarantee against a psychotic episode. Without the ability to purchase a firearm, however, there’s no need for a psychotic episode to kill and injure over a dozen people.

But the GOP has no intention of doing anything about the real problem. They do, however, fully intend to dismantle even more protections for government workers in the eventual hope of privatizating the VA. Because they’re shameless moral cretins.

Update: A reader writes in to note, correctly, that the shooter was being treated by military doctors, not the VA. The broader point remains, however: the shooter was getting medical attention for his mental health issues from the appropriate doctors.

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Don’t blame PTSD

by digby

Here’s a nice piece by Richard Allen Smith about the myths surrounding PTSD. It’s not a clear cut as people seem to think:

When mass shootings occur, much too commonly lately, my veteran friends and I always have the same initial reactions. First, a sincere hope that everyone is okay. But immediately after that we think, “Please don’t let it be a veteran.” When Kate Hoit, a 29 year-old Iraq war veteran and graduate student living in Washington, D.C., first heard of the shooting, she thought, “Here we go again with another round of onslaughts on veterans and those with PTSD.” But a strong link between violent crime and PTSD has not been firmly established.

A 2012 study found that 9% of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans surveyed reported arrests since returning from service. But even with this incidence of arrest, most offenses were associated with nonviolent behavior. It’s also notable that the veterans studied, as well as post-9/11 veterans in general, come from demographics associated with higher rates of criminal behavior (young, male, history of family violence, etc.) that are not related to service. That study concluded that veterans suffering from PTSD are at increased risk for criminal arrests, but those arrests are more strongly linked to substance abuse than a predilection towards violence.

The rush to erroneously blame PTSD for violent veterans has been noted. But available research and increased awareness hasn’t stopped the speculation.

As I wrote earlier in another context, this idea that soldiers in our society don’t expect violence outside the battlefield is clearly absurd since there is plenty of violence here in the “homeland” every single day. And this article indicates that the rush to assume any violence perpetrated by a combat veteran must be associated with PTSD is also fallacious. There are lots of reasons people start shooting in this country. It happens all the time to all kinds of people.

For all of our lugubrious “thank you for your service” rhetoric and symbolic support for the troops as we wave the flag at sporting events, it seems we haven’t really gained any greater understanding of their sacrifices. Indeed, much of our post Iraq reverence for the military seems more oriented to patting ourselves on the back for our patriotism and benevolence than any real understanding of the price veterans always pay for the wars our politicians send them to.

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Elizabeth the Best shows how it’s done

by digby

Safe on the home front?

by digby

In the reports about the most recent Ft Hood shooting, I keep hearing TV commentators and others solemnly opine that soldiers expect to face gunfire on the battlefield but don’t expect to face such dangers on the home front. And I keep asking myself, “why should that be?”

We all have to face that danger on the homefront:

Graphs courtesy of the FBI

Body language gibberish

by digby

This article is particularly concerned with the TSA training that has workers scanning travelers “body language” for hints as to whether they might be terrorists, but it applies to law enforcement in general. People generally rely way too much on their perceptions of when other people are hiding something, and those with government authority are not better than the rest of us at getting it right:

Most people think liars give themselves away by averting their eyes or making nervous gestures, and many law-enforcement officers have been trained to look for specific tics, like gazing upward in a certain manner. But in scientific experiments, people do a lousy job of spotting liars. Law-enforcement officers and other presumed experts are not consistently better at it than ordinary people even though they’re more confident in their abilities.

“There’s an illusion of insight that comes from looking at a person’s body,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. “Body language speaks to us, but only in whispers.”

The T.S.A. program was reviewed last year by the federal government’s Government Accountability Office, which recommended cutting funds for it because there was no proof of its effectiveness. That recommendation was based on the meager results of the program as well as a survey of the scientific literature by the psychologists Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies.

In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47 percent of the time, less than chance. Their accuracy rate was higher, 61 percent, when it came to spotting truth tellers, but that still left their overall average, 54 percent, only slightly better than chance. Their accuracy was even lower in experiments when they couldn’t hear what was being said, and had to make a judgment based solely on watching the person’s body language.

“The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through body language appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,” says Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Researchers have found that the best clues to deceit are verbal — liars tend to be less forthcoming and tell less compelling stories — but even these differences are usually too subtle to be discerned reliably.

There are a lot of True Crime shows on cable now that show police interviewing suspects and it’s obvious that a lot of cops put great store in the notion that people are supposed to act a certain way in certain situations. And when one doesn’t act the way they think you should, you are automatically suspect. I’m sure that may of them have hones their instincts over years and have a lot of experience to back up their hunches. But the fact is that they also tend to make these judgement based on “training” that highly overrates this whole notion of body language. And it often leads the astray. (These jury consultants do the same thing.)

This stuff isn’t exactly junk science but it’s awfully close. We should be wary of of authorities using these techniques in the same way we’d be suspicious if they started bringing in psychics or fortune tellers (or oracles for that matter) to tell them who is about to commit a crime.

Minority Report is a work of fiction.

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