When you're ready to stop being sick about the Supreme Court hackivist justices giving corporations free reign over America

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• The Supreme Court shows corporate America how to screw over its customers and employees without breaking the law. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine (wpvins.wordpress.com)

A reason to be thankful for living in Oregon: the Death with Dignity option

Compassion and Choices of Oregon, part of the national network "Compassion and Choices," responds to just the latest in a long series of absurd attacks on Oregonians' voter-approved freedom to end the suffering caused by a terminal illness.

What is most distressing about the debased media culture we live in is that, once the media decides you are a "point of view," you can never lose your status as being worthy of being consulted, no matter how unfounded are the things you say, no matter how grossly wrong you are, no matter how many years of data pile up that completely refute your arguments.

U.S. Catholic bishops misunderstand our death-with-dignity laws

By Harris Meyer, July 8, 2011 – Published at Crosscut.com

Meeting in Bellevue, the bishops take a firmer line on physician-assisted aid-in-dying laws and make allegations about abuses that are not supported by the experience in Oregon and Washington.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ policy on physician-assisted suicide, approved at their national meeting in Bellevue last month , is the latest move by Roman Catholic leaders to intervene in Americans’ personal health care decisions.

The eight-page policy, which the bishops passed 191-1 at their annual spring meeting, is full of inaccurate and misleading statements about the Death with Dignity laws in Washington and Oregon and the policy positions of the laws’ supporters. It ignores 14 years of experience in Oregon and two years in Washington. The head of Compassion & Choices, the main group supporting those laws, criticized the bishops’ policy statement as “full of reckless, unsubstantiated accusations.”

The bishops’ statement warns that the voter-approved Death with Dignity laws — which allow terminally ill, mentally competent adult patients to receive medications from their doctor to end their lives — essentially legalize murder. And it makes the stunning claim that U.S. leaders of the Death with Dignity movement in effect advocate ending the lives of people who have not sought help in dying.

“A society that devalues some people’s lives, by hastening and facilitating their deaths, will ultimately lose respect for their other rights and freedoms,” the bishops said. “Taking life in the name of compassion also invites a slippery slope toward ending the lives of people with non-terminal conditions.”

The new policy, “To Live Each Day with Dignity,” is the U.S. church’s first official policy on aid-in-dying, which also is legal in Montana under a 2009 Montana Supreme Court ruling. The policy follows increasingly aggressive efforts by the bishops to require Catholic health care facilities and providers to insert and maintain feeding and hydration tubes in terminally ill patients — even those who have written advance directives stating they don’t want them.

The bishops also have cracked down on Catholic hospitals that performed tube-tying operations for women who are not going to have more babies. Last year, a bishop expelled St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Ore., a century-old hospital founded by nuns, from his diocese for refusing to stop performing tubal ligations.

These policies matter because the bishops oversee more than 600 Catholic hospitals and hundreds of Catholic nursing homes, assisted living centers, and hospices.

Some Catholic ethicists and administrators in Catholic health facilities have expressed concerns about the bishops’ aggressive new mandates. One worried Catholic hospital administrator who didn’t want to be named criticized the bishops’ 2009 ethical and religious directive requiring Catholic health facilities to provide feeding and hydration tubes to patients with chronic and irreversible conditions — including persistent vegetative state, massive stroke, and advanced Alzheimer’s disease. The administrator told me the directive is a “slippery slope” that could lead to widening disregard for patients’ end-of-life wishes.

But there is growing pressure on everyone within the Catholic establishment to hew to the party line. A new article in Crisis Magazine by Cardinal Newman Society president Patrick J. Reilly called out prominent theologians at four major Jesuit universities who have supported the physician-assisted suicide movement. These professors “have done more than betray the Catholic Church,” Reilly wrote. “When professors deny the truths of faith and disregard the common good — especially of those whose lives are snuffed out prematurely — they violate the mission of a Catholic university.”

Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, a national group that supports and monitors patients using the Death with Dignity laws, blasted the bishops’ statement on physician-assisted suicide and what she called the church’s McCarthyesque attack on Catholic dissenters. “It’s one thing to state your position based on your religious beliefs, and quite another to falsify, bully, sanction, lobby, and impose that religious belief on others,” she said in a written statement. “The bishops misstate our work, our beliefs, our mission and 14 years of Oregon experience with aid in dying. That experience shows better end-of-life care, more choice, and more peaceful deaths.”

The bishops’ statement on physician-assisted suicide claims leaders of the aid-in-dying movement support “ending the lives of people who never asked for death, whose lives they see as meaningless or as a costly burden on the community.” But the Washington and Oregon laws spearheaded by Compassion & Choices set out a detailed procedure allowing only terminally ill patients to ask a physician to prescribe the lethal medication; that doctor and a second doctor independently determine whether the patient likely has less than six months to live, is mentally competent, and made the request voluntarily.

At a June 15 news conference in Seattle, Coombs Lee stressed that Compassion & Choices opposes providing aid-in-dying to anyone who doesn’t meet the legal criteria. “A bright line separates assisting suicide, which is a felony, from the medical practice of aid in dying,” she said. “To blur that line does a grave disservice to terminally ill patients.”

The bishops also claim that people with chronic illnesses or disabilities which are life-threatening only if they don’t receive treatment could qualify for lethal prescriptions under the Death with Dignity laws. “Thus the bias of many able-bodied people against the value of life for someone with an illness or disability is embodied in official policy,” they said.

There’s no evidence for that assertion. The Oregon and Washington laws define a qualifying terminal disease as “incurable and irreversible.” Dr. Tom Preston, medical director of Compassion & Choices of Washington, said Compassion & Choices would never consider working with patients whose condition could be reversed or effectively treated except to advise them they didn’t qualify under the law.

Another unfounded argument by the bishops is that offering terminally ill patients the option of assisted suicide undermines effective pain management and palliative and hospice care. In fact, studies show that the overall use of hospice care increased in Oregon to one of the highest rates in the country after the Death with Dignity law took effect in 1998. In Washington and Oregon, more than 80 percent of patients who received lethal prescriptions and died in 2010 were enrolled in hospice — far higher than hospice participation rates nationally. “We insist on good comfort care,” Preston said.

The bishops further contend that terminally ill people seeking aid in dying commonly suffer from mental illness such as depression, and that Death with Dignity laws and proposals ignore this issue. “Even a finding of mental illness or depression does not necessarily prevent prescribing the [lethal] drugs,” they said.

Supporters of aid in dying do worry about clinically depressed patients receiving lethal prescriptions. But Dr. Linda Ganzini, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University who has consulted on dozens of Death with Dignity cases and has studied the issue, told me her experience is that most people who want assisted suicide do not have depression or another mental health condition that would affect their decision. And if either of the two physicians who independently evaluates each patient’s eligibility thinks there is a possible mental health issue, that doctor must order a psychological evaluation. Under the Oregon and Washington laws, patients cannot receive a lethal prescription if their judgment is found to be impaired.

Finally, the bishops argue that dying patients’ pain can be alleviated through competent medical care, freeing them to focus on “the unfinished business of their lives, to arrive at a sense of peace with God, with loved ones, and with themselves.” In contrast, they said, assisted suicide “results in suffering for those left behind — grieving families and friends, and other vulnerable people who may be influenced by this event to see death as an escape.”

But Tony Rizzo of Puyallup, a self-identified Roman Catholic, said he “respectfully disagrees” with the bishops based on his and his wife Joyce’s experience at the end of her three-year battle with cancer. At Compassion’s June 15 news conference, Rizzo described how his wife of 43 years was suffering “excruciating” pain, despite her pain medication. She asked for and received a lethal prescription under the Death with Dignity law, and used it to end her life last September.

“Joyce was facing a painful and difficult death, and there was absolutely no hope,” he said through tears. “She obtained the peaceful, dignified death she desired. The whole family supported her decision. I shudder to think of the pain she would have experienced without the medication and without that choice, which the bishops would deny her.”

It would appear that the bishops need to take off their black robes, visit a hospice or hospital ICU, and silently watch and listen to expert staff work with terminally ill patients.

The

Image by Doctress Neutopia via Flickr"The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know it's being used." - Sam Smith

Was there ANY media coverage of the amazing, rousing, inspiring talk by David Cobb at the IKE BOX last month?

Cobb, a former presidential candidate for the Green Party, is barnstorming the country for Move to Amend, the great outfit that is not just wailing about the corruption and takeover of America by the special interests but that also has a simple, clear, and reasonable plan to fix it:

Get corporations back out of the Constitution, so that real people can again run things (rather than the collections of money known as corporations that are running things now)

Absolutely do not miss the Oregon State Fair this year for this alone.

Some of the most beautiful and yet most haunting, lump-in-your-throat, art seen in years will be available to us this year at the Oregon State Fair. August 26-Sept. 5.

DO NOT MISS THIS. Every child under the age of 90 needs to see and ponder these haunting art installations.

We went to Newport to see it at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and it has stayed with me since. There has not been a day gone by that I have not thought about that sad and poignant exhibit. And now we have the opportunity to see it here in Salem.

Before the pixels were even dry

The City's of Salem's Urban Development Quarterly puffery gazette included this as the top feature story in the most recent issue:

Vol 7, Issue 2, UDQ
Date: July 1, 2011 3:48:47 PM PDT
To: udquarterly@egov.cityofsalem.net
Reply-To: owner-udquarterly@egov.cityofsalem.net

AIR SERVICE RETURNS TO SALEM

SeaPort Airlines began serving Salem on April 25. SeaPort operates eleven weekly round trips between Salem and Portland with connecting flights to Seattle, WA and Pendleton, OR. For more information, go to www.flysalem.org.

But, scant days later, reality insists on breaking through. Ruh-roh!

Report shows SeaPort ticket sales were inadequate

. . . Last week, the airline announced it would not live up to a six-month agree for free use of the Salem Airport and would cancel flights starting July 17.

SeaPort president Rob McKinney said in April that flights would need to average three passengers per flight. The city reports flights averaged just 2.1. . . .

The bottom line is that no airline is or can be set up to cope with the future of energy prices. Air travel is the least efficient mode possible, and mass air travel is an artifact of the cheap energy blowout, recently concluded.

Now, average energy prices will destroy airlines year after year, with sharp volatile swings sometimes concealing and sometimes revealing a general, inexorably rising trend. The best thing to do with Salem's airport is to privatize it. Get the city out of it entirely and let the flight-dependent businesses pay taxes on what is being turned into a private facility for their use.

Instead, the city now proposes squandering of even MORE millions of taxpayer dollars on extending the runway in Salem -- even as downtown Salem is becoming quite noticeably pockmarked with vacant storefronts and more and more homeless haunt the street corners with their signs. Good going, folks! There's nothing quite like a $10 million runway extension or another $5 million poured down a drain to expand passenger and baggage handling capacity to really communicate total cluelessness about what our energy future portends.

Do or Die for community radio in Salem

If you want a locally-owned and run, community-powered, non-corporate radio station here in the Mid-Valley, better act now.

KMUZ has to either get on the air or lose the construction permit (that leads to a broadcast license) that they have worked so hard to get and fund. Get over there and help if you share the vision. Or resign yourself to the increasingly corporate-dominated KOPB.

Time Travel: Historic Oregon Newspapers digitized and available for you

Image via WikipediaJason Stone of the University of Oregon will provide information on the new
Historic Oregon Newspapers database on:

7 p.m., Tuesday, July 19,
Anderson Room B at Salem Public Library,
585 Liberty St SE.

Historic Oregon Newspapers is the culmination of more than two years’ work by staff at the University of Oregon Libraries, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a number of state agencies and stakeholders.

Anyone interested in Oregon history will be pleased to learn of the launch of the University of Oregon’s Historic Oregon Newspapers website. Through this new internet resource, the public has unprecedented access to “first draft” historical materials originally published by Oregon journalists between 1846 and 1922.

The website includes more than 180,000 pages of digital content drawn from historic newspapers that include the Salem Capital Journal and the Portland Oregonian.

This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Information/Reference Desk at 503-588-6052, or visit the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project’s website.

Visit Salem Public Library website.

Oh, is hacking into emails a crime?

All the furor about Rupert (Sauron) Murdoch's latest crimes reminds a few of us what a phony tempest "Climategate" was . . . As Bob Park notes:

4. HACKERS: CLIMATEGATE REVISITED.

Two years ago, e-mail files of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and selectively posted on the web. Rupert Murdoch newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, expressed shock at the "criminal conspiracy" and "scientific blacklisting." The "gate" suffix was added to invite comparison with the infamous break-in at the Watergate by Nixon's goons, but the climategate burglars were treated as heroes. There was not one line of criticism about the only criminal offense in the whole sordid climategate affair of hacking into private files. It is ironic that hacking by the Murdoch papers is now threatening the Murdoch empire.

"We'll give you something to cry about now, buddy"

So, some interesting responses after a post about Salem's bizarre system of mailing expensive printed-on-expensive-paper and expensively mailed (at nearly 7/9ths full first-class postage) non-bills to those of us who are paying our water and sewer bills via auto-debit every month.

First, the day after that post, LOVESalem HQ got another bill, for seemingly the very same ending date but stretching back into April -- no reason given for a second bill, the overlap, the different amounts on each, or even a note to say that I will not be getting charged twice. Nothing but "here, we'll be taking this." Naturally it also came with another wasted #10 reply envelope to throw away, along with the waste envelope it came in and the bill itself.

Maybe I'll get one for $70 after this post . . .

And then there's this from the assistant city manager, Sean O'Day, who is a very nice guy but who seems to have been listening to the IT Dept. whinge about "It's too haaaaaaaaaaard" for too long:

Thanks for sharing your views. By law we are required to provide a billing statement (even for those with automatic payment) and I understand your point to be that we should do so electronically. We agree, and this is something that staff has been working towards. Although electronic billing sounds easy, it is not as simple as it might seem given our current billing infrastructure. Nonetheless, we continue to work towards electronic billing because the City is indeed committed to both sustainable practices as well as keeping our operating costs as low as we possibly can for our residents.

Sorry, Sean, not good enough. Governments all over the world have been singing that song about why this and that stupid thing has to remain stupid because fixing it would require a massive overhaul of the computer system forever, and it doesn't fly any more.

In this day of Mac Minis more powerful than the mainframes of yore, telling me your computer is too stupid to print a bill to a pdf file and email that to a citizen's email address is the same as telling me that you have way too much deadwood in the IT dept and you need to clean house there and hire some high-schoolers.

If necessary, hold a contest to get it done. Go to Borderlands, tell the first five geeks you see that winner gets a case of beer, a case of Twinkies, and three decks of "Magic" cards for the first one to write an app that would allow any Salem citizen to manage the format of all their city communications using their cell phones. The law says you have to provide a billing statement. The law does not say you have to waste my money to do it.

Mark your calendar for Rythm at the Mill, Sunday afternoons

Looks like a very nice concert series coming up at Mission Mill starting July 24 and continuing July 31, August 7 and 28, and wrapping up Sept. 11, with all shows starting at 2 p.m., just $5 for Willamette Heritage Center members, $10 for non-members.

It's good to see these dates at that lovely venue -- it's difficult to keep a place fixed in an earlier time without making it a place people forget to make time for. Come check them out. They'll let you bring your comfy lawn chair and sell you some good local brews -- what better way to while away a summer Sunday afternoon?