you will notice, acetaminophen is the main concern.

Panel Recommends Ban on 2 Popular Painkillers
By Gardiner Harris
ADELPHI, Md. — A federal advisory panel voted narrowly on Tuesday to recommend a ban on Percocet and Vicodin, two of the most popular prescription painkillers in the world, because of their effects on the liver.
The two drugs combine a narcotic with acetaminophen, the ingredient found in popular over-the-counter products like Tylenol and Excedrin. High doses of acetaminophen are a leading cause of liver damage, and the panel noted that patients who take Percocet and Vicodin for long periods often need higher and higher doses to achieve the same effect. ....

my dog hates my mother!

can't you tell?

Tell Congress to make up for Obama's inaction during this week's National Week to Fight AIDS

Tell Congress to make up for Obama's inaction during this week's National Week to Fight AIDS
Obama is testing AIDS advocates' patience.
His 2010 budget cuts funding to fight AIDS globally, cuts funding for federal AIDS housing, and fails to lift the federal ban on syringe exchange. Now it's up to Congress to push back against Obama's cuts. Starting next week AIDS activists around the country are going to Sound the Alarm during the National Week to Fight AIDS by targeting members of Congress to make changes to Obama's misguided budget.
"President Obama's budget is not what we have hoped for. Congress has the ability to go in to increase funding for additional programs and now is the time to be targeting them," said Health GAP grassroots organizer Kaytee Riek
From June 30 to July 7 there will be actions across the country aimed at key members of Congress who control the nation's purse strings. There will be a march from Sen. Arlen Specter's office in Pennsylvania to Sen. Frank Lautenberg's office in New Jersey. Both are members of the Senate appropriations committee.
On July 7, everyone is encouraged to call Speaker Nancy Pelosi to demand that she "work with the Appropriations Committee to improve President Obama's budget and secure sufficient funding for AIDS programs in the US and around the world."
People who live in 13 states (California, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin) have a special responsibility to speak up! In these states, a Senator sits on an especially important Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, which decides funding for all programs in the U.S. It's up to that committee to fix the three major issues in the Obama budget. See how to contact these senators
Change that's time has come
In Obama's proposed budget, AIDS housing does not even keep pace with inflation or meet its anticipated demand for the year, let alone develop desperately needed new housing, even as new infections continue to rise. Congress needs to increase the Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS (HOPWA)'s budget by the $50 million dollars, to $360 million.
Wealthy countries have not kept their promises to increase funding for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, which is facing a $5 billion funding shortfall and is cancelling entire rounds of funding and cutting existing grants.
On the campaign trail, Obama heralded the Fund as a key investment. But his 2010 budget did not request any new money for the Global Fund.
Congress needs to increase funding for the Global Fund to the U.S.' fair share-$2.7 billion-to avoid cuts to grants.
As recently as this winter, President Obama has said that he is strongly in favor of lifting the current ban on using federal funds for syringe exchanges. But he failed to remove the ban from the appropriations bill, citing that this is not the right time and place. But there is no other way to lift the ban besides removing the language banning federal funding. And if we do not do it now, that means many more HIV infections this year. As the administration tells us, every 9 and 1/2 minutes there's a new infection in the United States.
Sound the Alarm is sponsored by ACT-UP Philadelphia, African Services Committee, American Medical Students Association, Artists for A New South Africa, Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project, Global Action for Children, Harm Reduction Coalition, Health GAP, Housing Works, New York City AIDS Housing Network and Proyecto Sol Philadelphia. But anyone can get involved! For more information about how to get involved contact soundthealarm.july7@gmail.comor go to sound-the-alarm.org

Happy pride! 40 years later

40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans
by Frank Rich
.... And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19. ....
But full gay citizenship is far from complete. “There’s a perception in Washington that you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people and that gay people will be satisfied with that,” said Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Milk,” last year’s movie about Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the 1970s. Such “crumbs,” Black added, cannot substitute for “full and equal rights in all matters of civil law in all 50 states.”
As anger at White House missteps boiled over this month, the president abruptly staged a ceremony to offer some crumbs. The pretext was the signing of an executive memorandum bestowing benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. But some of those benefits were already in force, and the most important of them all, health care, was not included because it is forbidden by DOMA. ....
Action would be even better. It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.

*Just looked it up. The nytimes used the word "gay" before 1987, but as far as I can tell, usually in quotes or proper names. So strange.
See here, here, & here

happy pride!

thinking Charles M. Blow is my favorite, ridiculous name and all

The Prurient Trap
.... At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing while doing another.
There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot. ....

AIDS action alert

In the United States there are 55,000 new HIV infections each year.
We cannot afford to wait.
Without the increased funds, programs such as the Ryan White Program, Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS, and comprehensive sex education will continue to suffer. In addition, there is much research to be done at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
Please join AIDS Action and the AIDS Budget and Appropriations Coalition in requesting the provision of necessary funds for these vital HIV/AIDS programs. Additionally this letter requests a removal of the ban on the use of federal dollars for syringe exchange programs. This ban has significantly impacted the ability for states and communities to determine the best prevention methods for their people and it must be removed immediately.
TAKE ACTION NOW!

comforting

comforting to know that my mother's 4-legged children are no less weird than the 2-legged variety.

Follow-up: Clarence Thomas has no soul

Supreme Court Says Child’s Rights Violated by Strip Search
.....Justice Clarence Thomas was the only member of the court to conclude that the strip search of Savana Redding did not violate the Fourth Amendment. He asserted that the majority’s finding second-guesses the measures that educators take to maintain discipline “and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge.” .....

HIV atlas

Mapping the Epidemic: HIV/AIDS Atlas
check the atlas out here
AP article about it here
should this inspire you, free HIV testing in Los Angeles this week
for testing locations, look here or call (800) 367-AIDS

Kevin Hart - "I Don't Like Ostriches"

Arizona, methadone, & driving

Sides weighed on methadone use by drivers
by Glen Creno
An effort to bar people who take methadone from driving kicked up a dispute at the state Capitol last week as legislators weighed the arguments of young women hurt in a car crash by an impaired driver against medical professionals who said methadone is safe.
The driver in the crash was taking methadone and other drugs. Methadone is prescribed for treating dependence and withdrawal of narcotics and to treat severe pain. Senate Bill 1003 proposed removing methadone's exemption in the state's DUI laws. ....

craig and snugget

only in NY, part 2

poor mommy!

good job with the IVs, guys.

more roosting chickens!

Ensign quits Senate GOP leadership post
Resignation follows admission of extra-marital affair

WASHINGTON - Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada has stepped down from his leadership post one day after admitting he carried on an extramarital affair with a woman who was on his campaign staff. ....
Ensign, 51, belongs to the men's Christian ministry Promise Keepers, and has championed causes pushed by the Republican's conservative religious base. ....

nytimes too broke for proof-reading?

One of their worst sentences ever:
"Resold tickets would be useless, bearing the name of the original buyer, Bob the Scalper, who is not apt to arrive, ID in hand, to escort his customers into a Cyrus show."
from:
Miley Cyrus Takes on the Scalpers
By Randy Cohen

read this - Frank Rich op-ed

Incredibly worthwhile & scary:

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers
Frank Rich
....The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...”
...

I love LOLs! (part 106)

Only in NY, and maybe Haifa?

great bankruptcy graphic

check out the full size version from Good magazine.

everyone's in the same time zone again!

Bing logo

did they think no one would notice the similarity to the OS X spotlight logo?

can the senate republicans lower the level this debate any further?

sure, because opposing one justice who opposes desegregation and the Geneva Convention, and another who supports school prayer and mandatory spousal notification of abortion is exactly the same as opposing a nominee who thinks homogeneity is a liability...

Senators Weigh In on Sotomayor's Confirmation Prospects

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: No, because I haven't decided if I would apply that standard. There was a time in the Senate when a person like Scalia and Justice Ginsburg -- she got 96 votes, Justice Scalia got 98.
I can't imagine any Republican voting for Justice Ginsburg not understanding that she was liberal. I can't imagine any Democrat voting for Justice Scalia not understanding he was conservative. We've lost our way.
And my point is that President Obama voted against Alito and Roberts, and he created a standard that if I followed I don't think I could vote for Judge Sotomayor.

The only current debate more tiresome is that over General Motors... There must be worthwhile arguments on both sides, but no one seems to be making them.

another mystifying nyt front page article

Really?

This is so F*#%*d up, I am surprised it was not our idea.

Marketplace: U.K. cop sting could bust you for bling
Police in one British town are hoping to nab criminals by asking residents to report their suspiciously glamorous neighbors with a controversial message: "Too Much Bling, Give Us A Ring."
...
Ben Bowling, a criminologist at King's College in London, fears not everyone will see it that way. He says the campaign encourages racial profiling.
BEN BOWLING: It's definitely racialized. There's no question about that. The idea of bling has kind of come from the hip-hop generation. You know diamonds, gold, $300 sneakers. And so the idea of using kind of street vernacular to identify those people who might be a bit too blingy for your neighborhood is, I think, to direct attention specifically to the black community, and that is a real problem.

TIME magazine?

Do DIY Anti-Overdose Kits Help?
By MAIA SZALAVITZ
Friday, May. 29, 2009
If there's anything more empowering than bringing someone back to life, Dan Bigg wouldn't know. He has personally resuscitated five people who were unconscious from drug overdoses, and the organization he co-founded in 1991, Chicago Recovery Alliance, has helped save hundreds of others from accidental drug-related death.
The organization's strategy is a simple one: Help people help themselves. Since 2001, Chicago Recovery Alliance has distributed more than 11,000 anti-overdose kits to drug users at needle-exchange programs and other sites in Chicago. The kits, which include vials of the drug naloxone (brand name Narcan), commonly used in hospitals and ambulances to reverse opiate overdose, have led to at least 1,000 successful overdose reversals in the city since 2001, according to Bigg. They are now part of a growing nationwide effort to stem the increasing rate of accidental drug-related fatalities.
Overdoses kill some 22,000 Americans each year — more than homicide and, in some states, like Utah, more than car accidents. Most overdose deaths happen accidentally, and most involve a combination of an opioid — either prescription painkillers, like methadone or OxyContin, or street drugs like heroin — and other depressant drugs, such as alcohol or Xanax. (Such deadly cocktails were responsible for the deaths of actor Heath Ledger in 2008 and former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith in 2007.) Typically, people who overdose on prescription drugs have a history of addiction, and they end up either taking more than their prescribed dose or mixing painkillers with other substances. ....