The federal appeals court in California has ruled that both references to God on US bank notes and “One nation under God” in the pledge of allegiance to the US flag are constitutional and not religious in nature.

It was a 2-1 ruling.

[Raw Story]

Cell phones, e-mail, websites, Twitter and the like are handy means for communications of people. However, did you know that communications companies provide information about you to law enforcement agencies? No judicial warrant necessary.

Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing has been gathering data and analyzing data about such surveillance in preparation of his PhD dissertation. He secured and released an audio recording of “Sprint/Nextel’s Electronic Surveillance Manager, Paul Taylor, describing how his company has provided GPS location data about its wireless customers to law enforcement over 8 million times. That’s potentially millions of Sprint/Nextel customers who not only were probably unaware that their wireless provider even had an Electronic Surveillance Department, but who certainly did not know that law enforcement offers could log into a special Sprint Web portal and, without ever having to demonstrate probable cause to a judge, gain access to geolocation logs detailing where they’ve been and where they are.” [Source: Ars Technica] You can be certain that other such communications providers, for example AT&T do the same. Perhaps that Garmin GPS travel device in your vehicle can provide the same information to other companies as well.

Soghoian describes how “the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.”

The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain such communications without any real oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn’t. If you think your electronic communications are private, think again. You have a constitutional right to freedom of speech but not necessarily a constitutional right to restrict your speech to just those you may want to hear it.

Sprint/Nextel’s Mr. Taylor said, “[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just [because of] the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in.”

“Government agents routinely obtain customer records from these firms, detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and of course, huge amounts of geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time,” writes Soghoian.

In Katz v. United States (1967), the United States Supreme Court established its “reasonable expectation of privacy” test. Katz was a decision that extended the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure to protect individuals in a telephone booth from wiretaps by authorities without a warrant. [See Katz v. United States (1967) 389 U.S. 347]

It appears the information being obtained via these means are pen registers/trap and trace devices. [See Wikipedia for similarities and differences]

Ed Felton, blogger of “Freedom to Tinker” properly points out that “[p]robably, many of these surveillance requests were justified, in the sense that a fair-minded citizen would think their expected public benefit justified the intrusiveness. How many were justified, we don’t know. We can’t know — and that’s a big part of the problem.

“It’s deeply troubling that this has happened without significant public debate or even much disclosure. We need to have a discussion — and quickly — about what the rules for electronic surveillance should be.”

We’ve all read about or watched news on TV about the H1N1 pandemic spreading around the world. While researching my family tree I came across an article about Scourges of the 19^th Century.

In 1869 a family immigrated from Ireland to New York City. Joseph and Bridget had three young children: Mary, age 4; Jane, age 3 and baby Agnes, an infant who died at five months of age. The cause of death was marasmus, a form of malnutrition, caused or made worse by contaminated milk.

Back in the 1800s contaminated milk was not unusual. Cows were fed distillery waste—called swill—which was widely distributed. “Swill milk” was neither healthy nor safe for the cow or the baby. Conditions for handling of milk back then were anything but sanitary. Containers for the milk were often reused by customers and milkmen without cleaning. The milk was carted around uncovered through filthy city streets. The milk was often watered down providing inadequate nutrition. Before pasteurization became mandatory bovine tuberculosis could be transmitted to humans through milk.

Infant mortality was high in the latter half of the 19^th century. Twenty percent of infants never reached their first birthday. In 1900 eighteen percent of children died before age five of pneumonia, gastroenteritis, diphtheria and malnutrition.

Modern medicine had not yet developed. Most diseases were not understood. Doctors made housecalls to the wealthy, but not the poor. Hospitals became places the sick went to die.

Patent medicines called “soothing syrups” contained morphine, heroin, opium or laudanum and quieted the crying of the babies at the cost of their addiction. Treatment of symptoms, but not the cause.

The 19^th century endured epidemics of typhoid, typhus, smallpox, influenza and bubonic plague along with others. Lack of means of prevention allowed cholera and yellow fever.

Cholera arrived in the United States as steamship travel and immigration increased. Cholera was thought to have been caused by God to punish sinners and target people who were considered morally reprehensible. Yet, in fact cholera is a bacterial disease spread through contaminated water. Half those stricken died within hours.

Yellow fever is a virus carried by mosquitoes. Coming from the Carribean it killed over 8,000 people in New Orleans in 1853. It spread up along the Mississippi River killed 20,000 people. Half the population of Memphis left the city costing it $15 million and leaving it bankrupt.

In1855 the yellow fever epidemic in Norfolk, Virginia resulted in other towns trying to prevent residents of Norfolk from entering their towns.

When the bubonic plague hit San Francisco in March 1900 the residents of Chinatown denied it for years as did business leaders and California’s governor, while people died.

Epidemics cause parentless children giving rise to an increase in orphanages. Deaths in childbirth usually resulted from postpartum infections leading to sepsis—blood poisoning.

In 1843 Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested the deaths following childbirth in maternity wards were the result of doctors failing to disinfect their hands and clothing. However, Dr. Charles Meigs of Philadelphia dismissed Holmes’ criticism. Meigs argued that doctors were gentlemen and the hands of gentlemen are clean.

These public health crises were the product of germs, but recognition of that fact took time for the public to accept. German scientist Robert Koch identified the microbe that caused tuberculosis in 1882. Convinced by Koch’s findings Dr. Hermann Biggs of New York in 1889 that tuberculosis was preventable wrote that tuberculosis could be prevented by disinfection, disposal of sputum, reporting of all pulmonary cases and educating the public. Biggs’ report met with resistance.

Governmental health agencies began to spring up creating divisions of pathology, bacteriology, and disinfection and imposing a quarantine. Crews were disbursed to scrub and clean public areas, disinfect water pipes and campaigns to educate the public on prevention and treatment.

This somewhat brief historical view of healthcare in the past caused me think about the current health care reform effort and the vehement resistance to it. Do we really want freedom from quality healthcare?  Do we really want to return to life of the 19^th century? I don’t personally feel like the government is taking away my freedom. Some apparently do.

I often recommend people go hug their bankers. (with tongue in cheek, of course). But maybe your banker should come and hug you. Why? Because some of us out here are “cash cows” for the banks.

Banking has changed during my lifetime—a lot. I can remember when banks were considered your “friendly neighborhood bank” where everybody knew your name. Those were the days when you could go into the bank and open up a small Christmas savings account in preparation for buy Christmas presents, etc.

[Read more →]

Yesterday, the Obama administration and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) settled four ongoing cases regarding public access to White House visitor records.  The most significant development is the commitment by the Obama administration to affirmatively post visitor records on-line on an ongoing basis, bringing a historic level of transparency to the White House.

The agreement stems from lawsuits CREW filed after the Bush and later the Obama administration refused to provide White House visitor records in response to CREW’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.  Visitor records are created by the Secret Service as part of its statutory responsibility to protect the president, vice president, their residences, and the White House generally.

After President Obama took office, CREW sought records of visits to the White House by health care and coal executives to determine the degree of their influence on health care and energy legislative proposals.  The government initially refused to turn over these records, but now has agreed to release them, as well as the Bush era records, as part of the settlement.  In turn, CREW has agreed to dismiss all the pending litigation.

CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan praised the White House saying, “The Obama administration has proven its pledge to usher in a new era of government transparency was more than just a campaign promise.  The Bush administration fought tooth and nail to keep secret the identities of those who visited the White House.  In contrast, the Obama administration – by putting visitor records on the White House web site – will have the most open White House in history.” [CREW]

[Read more →]

I’ve been listening to Bill Moyers and Bill Maher. They were talking about government. Moyers said (and I paraphrase):

Both the Republican and Democratic party’s have become so entrapped by the flood of money from corporations and Wall Street that Congress doesn’t represent people anymore, they represent corporations.

I have written blog posts in the past to the effect that corporate America has bought Congress and that if people want to regain control of their government they will have to acknowledge that situation and buy it back.

But that comment by Moyers made me realize I wasn’t viewing the picture broadly enough. I think about Wendell Potter’s admonition to us all about how for-profit health care insurance company’s are fighting reform because of the deleterious effect it would have on their profits, at the expense of people.

Potter made it crystal clear that those company’s jump to the tune of Wall Street’s demand that they continually increase their earnings per share year over year else are punished by stockholders selling off their shares of ownership.

Each quarter the corporations report their earnings and profits. Each quarter Wall Street analysts pour over those reports and pass judgment on whether the corporations meet Wall Street’s expectations or not. If they do meet or exceed expectations the corporation’s stock values promptly begin to rise as investors buy their stock. If they do not meet expectations investors dump their stock and move on to a more profitable corporation to invest in.

[Read more →]

Back in 2003 the Physicians for a National Health Care Program (PNHP) the following summary and conclusion in their article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The United States spends more than twice as much on health care as the average of other developed nations, all of which boast universal coverage. Yet more than 41 million Americans have no health insurance. Many more are underinsured. Confronted by the rising costs and capabilities of modern medicine, other nations have chosen national health insurance (NHI). The United States alone treats health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need. In this market-driven system, insurers and providers compete not so much by increasing quality or lowering costs, but by avoiding unprofitable patients and shifting costs back to patients or to other payers. This creates the paradox of a health care system based on avoiding the sick. It generates huge administrative costs that, along with profits, divert resources from clinical care to the demands of business. In addition, burgeoning satellite businesses, such as consulting firms and marketing companies, consume an increasing fraction of the health care dollar. We endorse a fundamental change in US health care—the creation of an NHI program. Such a program, which in essence would be an expanded and improved version of traditional Medicare, would cover every American for all necessary medical care. An NHI program would save at least $200 billion annually (more than enough to cover all of the uninsured) by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private, investor-owned insurance industry and reducing spending for marketing and other satellite services. Physicians and hospitals would be freed from the concomitant burdens and expenses of paperwork created by having to deal with multiple insurers with different rules, often designed to avoid payment. National health insurance would make it possible to set and enforce overall spending limits for the health care system, slowing cost growth over the long run. An NHI program is the only affordable option for universal, comprehensive coverage.

Health care reform is again near the top of the political agenda. Health care costs have turned sharply upward. The number of Americans without insurance or with inadequate coverage rose even in the boom years of the 1990s. Medicare and Medicaid are threatened by ill-conceived reform schemes, and middle-class voters are very concerned about the abuses of managed care. Other wealthy countries manage to provide universal health care at half the cost we pay. Their problems stem mainly from inadequate funding, not the structure of their systems. In contrast, the problems in the United States are systemic. Incremental changes cannot solve them; further reliance on market-based strategies will exacerbate them. What needs to be changed is the system itself.

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Mr. Paul Reeves

Interview of Paul Reeves

Before you read this post I recommend you first go to ABC News and watch the video.

The lady, Mary, called in from North Carolina and  informed President Obama she had been told there is a clause in the healthcare reform bill that provided the government would send someone to talk with “everyone of Medicare age to decide how they wish to die.” President Obama told her no, but seemed to miss what Mary was getting at, and began explaining about Living Wills. [Read more →]

Having just posted the House Committee’s analysis of HR 3200 I went to Huffington Post to see what they are saying about it.

Here are some excerpts:

HR 3200, the House version of health care reform. The Senate’s H.E.L.P.’s subcommittee finished marking up its version of a health reform bill too. Only the Senate’s Finance Committee is not finished with its work, since its draft of reform legislation has yet to be introduced. Regardless, Obama wants bills to the floors of each chamber for a vote by the August recess. It looks like he will get his way with HR 3200; probably not with the Senate’s product.

Here is what the American Medical Association had to say: [Read more →]