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POPSThree wishes for baby Sadie More: May she read in many languages, sing in many tongues and dance to many rhythms. May she walk beside a wheelchair with comfort, may she always know the sign for 'dreams', may she be comfortable in her own skin and with the skins of others. May she come to understand the difference between cost and value. All things cost. All people have value.… I hope that we who welcome Sadie into our lives…May we teach her the breadth of the word family. May we let her learn early to feel secure in the fact that she is loved, she is valued and she is wanted. May one day, when she is 30 and tired, when she is at the end of her rope, may she discover that our hands have weaved her an extra foot or two. That we have stored up enough love, packed into every corner of her heart, she never need fear of running out. May we give her the foundation of knowing love. From this beginning, may Sadie, first crawl, then walk, then run, finally fly ...
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POPSElizabeth Taylor in Hospital I think myself that this lady is doing ok to reach 77 after her sometimes hard and stressful life. I try to be stress free and hope to live beyond 100! :)
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POPSClosed Minds Shout Down Disabled Woman in Wheelchair As witness and reporter Brian Donohue said, "There was no discussion, no one listened to anyone." Visit NJ.com to read the report and view the video here: Health Care Reform Town Hall: no room for a centrist by Brian Donohue/The Star-Ledger
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POPSMedicare Waste Goes Unchecked: Thanks to Pete Stark (D-Calif) and Dave Camp (R-Mich)
From wheelchairs and walkers to orthopedic shoes and needles, Medicare buys tens of thousands of products every day for elderly Americans. "There were products that we had as much as 75 percent savings. The average was 29 percent," said Mike Leavitt, the former HHS secretary who oversaw the program. "It would have saved billions if we could've actually implemented it, but Congress deferred it. In Washington speak, that means we put it off forever," he said. Leavitt blames Congressmen Pete Stark (D-Calif.) and Dave Camp (R-Mich.) for introducing legislation that terminated the contracts and postponed the program for 18 months. Leavitt says the congressional intervention helps explain why many are suspicious of claims that Washington can cut enough waste to actually pay for health care reform, as President Obama told a joint session of Congress last month . "Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan,"
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POPSWhy inclusionary language matters More: You can believe with all your heart that sexism is terrible and evil, but when you call a woman a bitch, it kind of undermines your point. You can think that people with disabilities are oppressed and marginalized by society, and that this is wrong, but when you call something “lame,” you’re saying that you think it’s ok to continue oppressing people with disabilities. When you say that someone should “step up,” you are unconsciously erasing everyone in the population who cannot step, like wheelchair users and people who are bedbound. When you refer to someone or something as “insane” or “crazy,” you are using mental illness as a slur. So stop it. Stop using exclusionary language. Start including people. And stop trying to defend it. If you’re too lazy to find a better word or phrase to use, that’s your problem, not society’s.
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POPSA Conversation With Gore Vidal Unfolds: ‘We’ll Have A Dictatorship Soon In The US’ He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me. Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s.
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POPSMadToe-Footloose on the Net Never underestimate people with disabilities. I have "talked" with Leigh Anne a few times. She is a real go getter and last year fulfilled her dream to go sky diving. ( Better her than me, I'm to chicken :D ).
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POPSDid bad care spur a mother to kill her disabled daughter?
More: She wrote that the aides bathed Yvette "like a car," with cold water at times to punish her. When Yvette would scream, the aides would turn the hot water back on before the nurse in charge could arrive, according to the letter. "There's much more but you can ask my family. "... They can tell you. I can't go on like this. She has been begging me to end it for two years," Diana Harden wrote. "My health is failing and I don't want to leave her alone."… Because she was partially paralyzed, Yvette Harden could get around only with a wheelchair. But staff took away the motorized chair after Harden broke a glass patio door and bent the metal on a gazebo fixture in July 2008. She was given a manual chair that she had to be strapped into because it was too small and made the pain in her legs and back worse, according to Department of Public Health records. She told her mother, "I want to die; I don't want to live without my wheelchair…"
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich on the criminalization of poverty There are a lot of Kafkaesque stories in this piece, like that of wheelchair-bound 62-year-old homeless veteran Al Szekely, who was imprisoned after a nighttime raid on a homeless shelter. His crime? He had an outstanding court summons for criminal trespassing -- he'd gotten a ticket for sleeping on a sidewalk. In other words, " hey arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless." The truancy discussion strikes me as the most vicious part, though.
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POPSRidiculous and False Article: Francis Scott Key Emerges from Grave, Demands His Poem Back
It is so absurd to write that Francis Scott Key would advocate for President Barack Hussein Obama and be chummy with Karl Marx. Key was a member of The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color (a.k.a The American Colonization Society). Their goal was to emigrate all free blacks to Africa (see Liberia). The membership included Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Stephen Douglas. Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington (nephew of George), was elected as its president. The most distinguished members of ACS were all slaveholders. The ACS raised funds and purchased the Elizabeth which sailed to West Africa in 1820. As a slaveholder, aristocrat and member of the exclusive club, Wealthy White Male Property Owners, Key would probably smack Karl Marx with a copy of the Wall Street Journal for uttering, workers of the word unite . Key was an Evangelical Episcopalian and as such, he'd burn Marx at the stake for his views on religion.
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POPS Africa MPs Cheer Lockerbie Bomber September 9, 2009 Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi has made his first public appearance since receiving a hero’s welcome on his return to Libya. The BBC’s Rana Jawad, in Tripoli, says a nurse wheeled Megrahi to a small stage in the lecture hall at the city’s medical centre. He appeared to be frail, wearing a surgeon’s mask that covered most of his face and a colourful, sequined traditional skullcap, she says. After he started coughing, he was immediately wheeled off the stage. Our reporter says it seemed a carefully orchestrated event intended to send a signal to the Scottish, British and US governments. Hey, let’s send a few more hundred billion taxpayer dollars to Africa.
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POPSFuneral Parlor Discovers Nursing Home is Tattooing Residents Police officials suspect that nursing home employee Danny Martinez, whose brothers own the Northwest Body Art tattoo parlor, may be behind the incidents. In a raid on the Sunny Days complex, police also discovered the following tattooes: * "Not used in 50 years" on the penis of a 109 year old man. * "I left my heart in San Francisco" on the chest of an 86 year old transplant recipient * "Shit happens....regularly" on the bottom of a 79 year old woman. * "The Razorbacks Played Here" on the crotch of a 91 year old former university cheerleader. When asked why the allowed themselves to be tattooed, one resident said that "we were told that it was cool and that all the kids had body art. We thought it would make us look younger."
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POPSWoman in Wheelchair Heckled and Booed at NJ Town Hall Meeting Footage of the meeting at clip source. The word shame isn't a word that I think of or say, but as I watched this footage, my thoughts just kept repeating shame, shame, over and over again. This is a room full of older adults acting worse than badly behaved children. I'm beginning to agree with a comment I read at HuffPo: this anger is not about health care reform. Some people are frightened because the USA that they understand is disappearing and their response is to lash out at any perceived cause. I don't feel sorry for them because I am old enough to know their USA. I grew up in it. I hate it. And I cheer its demise. I wish for a better and healthier USA for young people.
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POPSThe Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain? As neural engineering becomes more complex and more widespread, the potential for security breaches will mushroom. For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb.
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POPSMillitary Vets Don't Need to be Told They're a Burden to Society For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be "not worth living." The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to "shake the blues." There is a section which provocatively asks, "Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?" There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as "I can no longer contribute to my family's well being," "I am a severe financial burden on my family" and that the vet's situation "causes severe emotional burden for my family." When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel? One can only imagine a soldier surviving the war in Iraq and returning without all of his limbs only to encounter a veteran's health-care system that seems intent on his surrender .
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POPSThe Death Book for Veterans The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to "shake the blues." There is a section which provocatively asks, "Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?" There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as "I can no longer contribute to my family's well being," "I am a severe financial burden on my family" and that the vet's situation "causes severe emotional burden for my family."
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POPSBarack Obama's stepmother: I owe my life to the NHS more: "I was very down at the time but luckily I was here in Britain, in what was then a foreign country to me, where the doctors, nurses and surgeons cared for me like I was their own child." The widow, who attended President Obama's inauguration in January, turned to the NHS again five years ago when she needed two hip replacement operations. "If I'd been asked to pay for my new hips, well, I wouldn't have been able to afford them," she said. "I would have without a doubt ended up confined to a wheelchair."
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POPSThe Heart Attack Grill, Hospital-Themed Restaurant Making a party of artery clogging goodness. Customers weighing over 350 lb (160 kg) eat for free if they weigh in before each burger & a free wheelchair service is offered to “patients” who finish a Quadruple Bypass Burger.
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POPSMaking lives better by recycling durable medical equipment More: A man has come to pick up a cane and commode for his disabled wife. He knows there is no charge for the items, but he pledges to make a future donation as he walks away, as soon as he can, when "things get better some day." A woman arrives and hopes to find a walker for a friend who "can't stand on her own two feet anymore." Meanwhile, an elderly woman approaches with a large floor mat balanced on the handlebars of her own walker. Susan runs up to greet her — she is a friend and regular visitor who routinely searches the neighborhood for items that Home Cares might use. A volunteer named Wayne offers to assist me, and I discover through conversation that he's an expert mechanic available to help with wheelchair problems. A young man in a baseball cap arrives — there, weekly as usual, with his pick-up truck brimming with donated medical equipment and supplies.
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