In this “modern” era, when we spend billions of dollars to fight wars to extend the US penis promote and preserve Democracy around the world, women are now equal in health under the law. Obama announced Thursday, January 19, 2012, that insurance companies will be required to cover birth control without a co-pay. BIRTH CONTROL! Can you believe it? Are we not living in the dark ages?

In their article, the Hill quotes Planned Parenthood:

Birth control is not just basic health care for women, it is an economic concern,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. ”This common sense decision means that millions of women, who would otherwise pay $15 to $50 a month, will have access to affordable birth control, helping them save hundreds of dollars each year.

Of course, it’s the elephant in the room. We live with the unspoken irony that Viagra is covered and birth control is not. So, a man can have his turn-on paid for, yet there’s a cost for the recipient woman to not become pregnant? How does this make sense? I’ve always said this “arrangement” would be very different if men got pregnant.

It’s interesting that besides a thank you to Obama from Planned Parenthood (which I recommend you sign), the current coverage (and a good article) I found was from The Hill. Because it is a conservative blog, the comments were predominantly and extremely negative toward women being treated equally regarding reproduction.

Although this news broke last week, I didn’t want to let it go by without posting something.

Update: On Friday, January 20, the administration announced it would allow a year for religious institutions to comply. In their article, The Hill notes that Obama’s initial announcement was made after HHS Kathleen Sibelius rejected over-the-counter sales of the morning after pill, which outraged women’s reproductive rights groups.

Go to www.voterocky.org and show them some love. Do what you can to get the word out, donate, and get this third party going.

“In this day and age, where the Democrat and Republican parties are no longer the voice of Main Street, but the puppets of Wall Street, it is natural that a Third Party should appear to champion the traditionally conservative proposition that the Constitution is the blueprint for the operation of the government of the United States.” —Gatewood Galbraith (1947-January 18, 2012) in a stump speech during his 2000 congressional race

Rocky Anderson for President! He’s running on the newly formed Justice Party ticket and telling it like it is: “I consider this a second party.” “We need a new paradigm where people are committed to representing the public interest.”

Here he is on Democracy Now! Listen to this 21 min. interview – you won’t regret it!!! He also had a very snappy, compelling interview on Dylan Ratigan today that I hope gets posted. When it does, I’ll grab it for here. (His interview on Ratigan’s show was the first I’d ever heard of him, and can you tell I’m impressed?)

It’s a grass roots campaign. Let’s help him out. If you agree with his views, please comment, share, and “Like” this post! Go to the Justice Party website and see what you’d like to do. It looks like they can use some help. Here’s Rocky’s wikipedia page, which you can reference any day but Wednesday 1/18/12, because wiki’s going dark for 24 hours in protest of proposed SOPA legislation.

I hope you had a blessed holiday season and wish you joy, peace, and the best in all things.

Have a happy, healthy, prosperous New Year!

Warmly,

LBNYC

???

Are the new 9.2% jobless numbers a surprise? The new report announced today says that 18,000 jobs (net) were added in June. Of course, we know that many, many more people are underemployed, have stopped looking for work, are working part-time, or working at levels far below their skill sets, intelligence, and pay grade.

Didn’t I and we warn you that candidate Obama would fail to lead?

His answers to getting the jobs moving have so far been to:

• hand the stimulus bill check to citizens – (did I hear today that it totaled appx. $200,000/person? could that be right?) instead of just giving them/us the money – or doing nothing at all, which would have been much more useful.

• blame Bush

• blame Republicans

• blame the environment

• blame Europe

• blame gas prices

• shake his head and say oops, I guess the projects weren’t actually shovel-ready

I swear, don’t Obama and all his high-fallutin’ cabinet, consultants, and czars have some kind of original idea in their collective brains for getting things going?

Again, as in 2008, he shows far more enthusiasm for campaigning at $38,000 fundraisers than he does for providing exciting solutions to our economic quagmire.

Perhaps Bill Clinton’s Chicago jobs summit will set off some new actions and brain trusts.

It’s just sad, sad, sad because what choices will we have in 2012?

How’s your job situation?

Geraldine Ferraro died today at 75 years old. We lost her way too young. What a champion she was – especially for women. She will be missed. I miss her already. Rest in peace, Geraldine, and thank you for all your hard work and service to our country.

Addendum: Here’s a NYT video interview where Geraldine talks about her life. It’s an historical rather than a controversial piece.

——

I published this post on May 30, 2008, comprised of the video Part 1 up top and Part 2 below,  under the title of Geraldine on Greta: Tells It Like It Is:

Finally, Geraldine Ferraro is back! After being race-baited by the Obama campaign for saying that a majority of Black people were voting for him, being shamed off the air, going underground, writing articles, and fielding calls from Obamabots who published her number, she speaks for the many people who called to complain about the state of this sorry Democratic Primary process. On the May 29, 2008 10pm edition of FOX News show On The Record, Greta Van Susteren interviews Ferraro who discusses Hillary’s poor treatment by what I’m afraid have now become the usual suspects. Van Susteren seems to be one of the few talk show hosts who is giving Hillary supporters a voice. Isn’t that what Obama gets in the media every single day? Here’s the video in two parts. Enjoy, take a deep breath and cheer for the dedication, stamina, and forthrightness of one of our women leaders with the courage to stand up and tell it like it is.

Here’s former Presidential VP Candidate Ferraro’s op-ed piece in the May 30, 2008 Boston Globe.

ABC Eyewitness News has just reported Hillary Clinton said today that she won’t run for President in 2016. If Obama wins in 2012, she will not stay on as Secretary of State, nor does she have interest in being Vice President. She is very happy in her current position and looks forward to the next two years of working at the State Department.

Addendum: HRC’s statements are from a stellar sit down interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during her visit to Egypt. In answer to Blitzer’s questions, she also stated that she does not want to be Secretary of Defense. Her empathetic and serious expressions of concern about the nuclear threat in Japan were delivered much more eloquently than the president’s cool, monotonic, prepared statements.

Clinton was ebullient in characterizing her good fortune to represent the US and President Obama in helping solve international problems on the world stage at this time in history.

Addendum.1: (continued from Wolf Blitzer’s interview)

Libya: SOS Clinton said she thinks Obama is doing the right thing in not taking unilateral action on Libya. Paraphrasing the SOS: We have a lot of problems around the world that need resolution (she named several countries, but I couldn’t type that fast–she’s so smart), but they must be authorized by the international community.

Japan: It’s minute by minute, but we’re currently not recommending that U.S. personnel leave the country. Based on the feedback she’s getting from the experts, there was a lot of confusion as there would be in any disaster of this magnitude. “I mean if you’re hit first by an earthquake then a tsunami [....]“

That’s our girl!

And now, fifty people are left to protect Japan and the world from having a nuclear catastrophe at four of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daichi facility. Each of the reactors is equal to one Three Mile Island.

Back up power and emergency systems are gone. There have been radioactive releases. There’s more waste in the spent fuel pools than in the reactors. Normally the water should be twenty feet above the fuel. Perhaps the rods have fallen down into the water. At Three Mile Island, it took five years for the system to cool down. Only then did they discover that there had been a fifty percent meltdown after the system was turned off for only two hours. In Japan it’s been much longer.

All the fuel could melt and go through the bottom of the pressure vessel. None of these structures is made to cope with this kind of event. If this happens, there would be an easier path through the molten vessel to the outside. Once the spent rods are in the pool, no one thinks about it (protecting them further).

Wikileaks revealed the U.S. had said that Japan wasn’t properly regulating its nuclear power industry. Japan built six reactors at one location, concentrated them there, because everyone said “not in my backyard.” (duh!)  That’s never been done before, and it makes things much more complicated and likely to happen with them all subject to the same conditions.

GE whistleblower – In 1975, in the design of Mark 1 containments they hadn’t taken into account loads caused by loss of water and other events. At that time he was asked to be project manager. Event: large loss of coolant accident – break of pipe and release of steam and containment products into the pool itself. Heavy vibrations weren’t considered. The steam from a large break should be condensed by water in the suppression pool. You could have a meltdown, or an uncontrolled release of radiation.

The cause of accident is the combined earthquake and tsunami which wiped out all backup systems onsite, so they haven’t been able to cool the system as designed. On all five of the Mark 1 plants at Fukushima, the spent fuel is on the reactor fueling floor. Why? It’s handy because they don’t have to move it very far. After it cools, the fuel is moved into another storage pool that’s outside of the reactor building. Under normal circumstances, it’s water-filled.

Usually you’d have a couple of days in which to act. Unit 4, which is now under threat of meltdown due to a fire wasn’t even in operation at the time. (Now @ 9pm ET, it’s claimed the fire is out.) However, in a horrible confluence of events, Unit 4 was under a maintenance program, and all of the fuel in the reactor had been off-loaded from the reactor into the fuel pool. So, it was verrryyyy hot.

* This post is comprised of my notes from Elliot Spitzer’s interviews of nuclear energy experts on his CNN show tonight 3/15/11. Although they are experts, these interviews are opinion and likely we will not know exactly what happened for a long time — if ever.

Obama needs to re-chart his energy course, which is heavily laden with nuclear, NOW! Declare a MORATORIUM on building new plants! Here we go again: NO MORE NUKES! NO MORE NUKES!

Praying for Japan and its people. God bless us all.

Entitlements? Oh, you mean, Social Security taxes we all pay with a portion of our salaries — in good faith that it will be there for us when we need it, as stated by law? How is that an entitlement? I think it should mean that we’re entitled to hold our government to its words and laws.

Why is no one – except for Donald Trump, who called Obama the biggest war monger of all – talking about the enormous budgetary expense of being in TWO, yes, TWO WARS for ten years that have cost us, that is, just the US not counting other countries: one trillion, one hundred fifty-two billion, eight hundred million dollars? Now how does that make sense? A big ole killing machine while our citizens go without jobs, are forced to leave their homes, do without simple necessities or food. This expenditure has increased by one million dollars in the short time that I’ve been writing this post.

The enormous war elephant stands in the middle of the room. Shhh, let’s cut the programs that help people get on their feet in these “troubled economic times” and the suffering populace won’t say a thing if we don’t….

Stuck MTA bus, slid to to wrong side of 79th Street @ 1st and 2nd Avenues in the blizzard. Photo 2010 by Lady Boomer NYC

CBS-2 TV News, covering the NY area, reported that sanitation workers who should have been at their posts cleaning up after the blizzard were discovered to have been doing just the opposite. Instead of plowing the streets, it’s alleged that workers were hanging out for hours inside a lunch spot or using the equipment to drive down roads without really clearing them.

The blizzard crippled Manhattan, and especially the boroughs. Streets in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx remained uncleared for a week since the storm struck on December 26, 2010. (I’d source it for you, but so far the report’s so fresh that it’s not yet on the CBS local station’s website that reported it.

We’ll see. This could become a criminal investigation. A number of deaths have occurred because ambulances were unable to get to those in need. Until now, the department of sanitation has said that it was unable to clear the roads due to abandoned cars. Some residents and borough elected officials have blamed Mayor Bloomberg for slow response and it looks like the mayor is trying to defend his record by getting to the bottom of these rumors.

It’s been reported in days since the blizzard that some supervisors told some workers to stand down because they were angry at the city and/or Bloomberg for various concessions they had to make in contract negotiations. NYC is launching an investigation into the “stand down” rumors.

I’ll get you a source when I can. I have to run out! Happy New Year!