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FDA’s New Stance on Blood Donations Still Treats Gay Men as Less Than Equal

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By Deirdre Fulton/ Common Dreams

While they praised the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for formalizing a policythat loosens the longstanding ban on blood donation by gay and bisexual men, LGBTQ and public health advocates on Monday said the “discriminatory” plan still leaves much to be desired.

The final guidance, based on a proposal put forth by the FDA in May, says gay and bisexual men are now eligible to give blood—provided they have abstained from sex with another man for at least a year. The previous ban had been in place for approximately 30 years.

“While today was a big success, there is still a long road ahead,” the National Gay Blood Drive Campaign said in a statement. “We will continue to encourage the FDA to consider all the evidence until they arrive at a non-discriminatory policy and discrimination based on sexual orientation is eliminated from the blood deferral process altogether.”   [Read more…]

HUD Bureaucrats to San Diego’s Homeless Service Providers: My Way or the Highway

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The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently came out with a 55-page document titled “Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing: Defining “Chronically Homeless”.

I can only imagine the thousands of dollars spent to clarify that: agencies receiving HUD funds to serve chronically homeless people cannot use those funds for persons or households if any of the periods separating the requisite “4 separate occasions in the past 3 years” where they were homeless (according to the HUD definition of homeless) were less than 7 nights.

If that sounds convoluted to you, imagine being an underpaid, intake staff person at an underfunded homeless service agency, interviewing a homeless client to determine if they can accept him or her into the program without jeopardizing their HUD funding.   [Read more…]

Working Until It’s Time for Your Grave

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Like many Americans, my mom has no retirement savings

By Tiffany Williams / OtherWords

“My plan is just to work until I die.” That’s how my mom sums up her retirement prospects.

She’s worked more than 40 hours a week as a legal secretary in north Florida for as long as I can remember. When my brother and I were kids, we went to her office every Saturday and entertained ourselves by sliding across the floor in fancy law firm chairs while our single mom worked overtime in her cubicle.   [Read more…]

Benefits of Walking Are So Huge, Let’s Make Sure Everyone Can Do It

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By Jay Walljasper / Common Dreams

Mounting evidence that a daily walk helps prevent a host of serious diseases is beginning to influence debates about health care, community vitality, poverty, race and opportunity.

“The health benefits of walking are so overwhelming that to deny access to that is a violation of fundamental human rights,” declared Robert A. Bullard, dean of the School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University,  in a keynote at the 2nd National Walking Summit held this fall in Washington, D.C.

“The pursuit of health is also about justice,” emphasized US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. It’s about making sure “everyone in America has a good shot at being healthy.”   [Read more…]

Inclusion and Equity Essential in San Diego’s Climate Action Plan

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By Diane Takvorian / Environmental Health Coalition (EHC)

Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) is supportive of the proposed City of San Diego Climate Action Plan with amendments to include equity for impacted communities and commitments for implementation funding.

EHC is very supportive of the strong targets and actions in the City of San Diego’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) and appreciate the great amount of work staff and the Environmental and Economic Sustainability Task Force has done to bring the CAP to this point. Although we appreciate the mention of equity in the CAP, in order to ensure that the CAP goals are met within the timeline prescribed in the plan in an equitable manner funding for implementation and integration of specific equity focused directives must be included in the CAP in each section of the plan.   [Read more…]

Naomi Klein: Liberté is not just a Word

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Backs defiance of French protest ban during climate change negotiations.

By Naomi Klein/ Democracy Now

The deal that will be unveiled in less than a week, likely to much fanfare and self-congratulation from politicians, echoed by an overly deferential press, will not be enough to keep us safe. In fact, it will be extraordinarily dangerous. We know, from doing the math and adding up the targets that the major economies have brought to Paris, that those targets lead us to a very dangerous future.   [Read more…]

The Invisible Disability Project

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Re-imagining special education for those with invisible disabilities

By Dr. Linda Williams / Invisible Disability Project

I recently attended a Special Education IEP (Individualized Educational Program) meeting for a boy in first grade. Academically bright, he looks just like his peers: neat, dressed in current clothing, he runs around with the latest gadgets, and wears the cool shoes. However, he was diagnosed with Pragmatic Language Impairment and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. He’s on the Autism Spectrum, and struggles to understand the social cues of others.   [Read more…]

Brilliant! Apply Abortion Restrictions to Gun Buying

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By gloriasb / Daily Kos

A Missouri state representative has pre-filed a bill that would make it as difficult to buy a gun as it is to get an abortion. According to St. Louis Magazine, Democratic State Rep. Stacey Newman’s bill would “require anyone buying a gun to follow the restrictions required of women seeking abortions, including a 72-hour waiting period.”

Newman is a longtime advocate for common-sense gun laws, and also a pro-choice activist, which makes her a fish out of water in the predominantly right-wing-Republican Missouri legislature, where she is regularly subjected to jeers, sneers and outright insults. Still, she has courageously drafted House Bill 1397, which states that before Missourians can buy a gun, they will have to: [follow link to read more]   [Read more…]

Black Lives Matter Makes Powerful Connection With Racist Drug War

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A National Town Hall recently took up the question of how Black Lives Matter fits in with drug reform.

By Phillip Smith / Alternet

The Black Lives Matter movement sprung out of the unjust killings of young black men (Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown), either at the hands of self-styled vigilantes or police. But as the movement blossomed and matured, BLM began turning its attention to a broader critique of the institutional racism behind police violence against the black population.

While the war on drugs plays a central role in generating conflict between the black community and law enforcement, the critique of institutional racism in policing and the criminal justice system necessarily implicates the nation’s drug policies. The grim statistics of racially biased drug law enforcement are well-known: blacks make up about 13% of the population, but 30% of all drug arrests; blacks account for nearly 90% of all federal crack cocaine prosecutions; black federal crack offenders were sentenced to far more prison time that white powder cocaine offenders; blacks and other minorities are disproportionately targeted in traffic stop and stop-and-frisks despite being less likely than whites to be carrying drugs, and so on.
  [Read more…]

North Of The Fence: Meth Seizures Up, Violent Attacks and Holiday Cheer

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With the horror of the San Bernadino events and PBS reporting that 355 mass shootings took place across the United States in 2015, the South Bay this week also faced its share of disturbing violence and mayhem:

KPBS reported that meth seizures are up at the border since 2009. The drug is now being produced in Mexican “super labs,” staffed by university-educated chemists and supplied by manufacturers based in Asia. This trend is occurring during a time when less and less marijuana is being grown in Mexico due to its legalization in the U.S. The Imperial Beach Patch showed the terrible destruction meth can cause on a young adult.   [Read more…]

Nailing Monsanto

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At the tail end of CBS This Morning this Wednesday, was a brief interview with Monsanto’s CEO, Hugh Grant (not the movie star), on the debate over GMO labeling. He tried to come off as a soft-spoken, reasonable man, describing his company as “…an agricultural company. We sell seeds to farmers and those farmers make harvests and those harvest end up on plates around the world.”

Cool. The man running the company that is poisoning our planet and our population is just so damn nice, what with putting all that poison (err food) on our plates!

What if we don’t want his poison? Nice Mr. Grant wants to cram it down your throat. His nice agricultural company spent over $4 million killing a GMO labeling initiative in Colorado. They spent $6 million stopping a similar effort in Oregon.   [Read more…]

Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off of America’s Blue Collar Whites

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By Barbara Ehrenreich /TomDispatch

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate.

While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all.   [Read more…]

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