Hospital Lab Tech in Colorado May Have Infected
5,700 With Hepatitis

This is a gruesome story. Kristen Diane Parker, a lab/surgery tech at Rose Hospital in Denver (one of our most prominent medical centers) who was infected with Hepatitis C, stole syringes filled with the pain-killer Fentanyl from the OR, shot herself up, put saline in the used syringes and replaced them on the rack in the OR. She got fired and went to work in Colorado Springs where she did the same thing.

Rose Hospital is sending out letters to everyone who had surgery during the months she worked there to advise them they may be exposed to Hepatitis C.

Authorities say Parker admitted to changing out syringes containing a saline solution with ones filled with the painkiller Fentanyl. Parker injected herself with the drug, according to a complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Denver.

An affidavit by Mary F. LaFrance, an investigator for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, says at least nine surgery patients at Rose have tested positive for hepatitis C, which is incurable. About 6,000 patients are being advised they may have been exposed and need to be tested.

The affidavit supporting the federal criminal charges against her is here (pdf). [More...]

And, get this:

Hospital officials said they knew the technician had the virus when she was hired. She began work Oct. 21, 2008. She was fired April 13.

Parker has confessed and told authorities she is a former heroin user:

In a videotaped interview Monday with police, according to the Gazette, Parker told a detective she used heroin from July to September last year. She allegedly told the investigator she thought she caught the virus from injecting herself with dirty needles.

After a co-worker reported she was stabbed by a needle protuding from Parker's pocket and that Parker had been in an OR room without reason to be there, she was given a drug test which came back positive for Fetanyl and was fired. She then went to work for the Audubon Ambulatory Surgery Center in Colorado Springs, from May 4 until Monday when she was arrested. Parker told police she did the same thing at Audobon she did at Rose. Up to 1,000 patients at Audobon may be infected.

If you had surgery at Rose, you should get a letter by Tuesday or Wednesday. There's a hotline set up which has been very busy today. As to Hepatitis C,

An estimated 3.2 million people in the United States have chronic hepatitis C virus infection. Most people don't look or feel sick.

What happens: For every 100 people who do contract the disease, 75 to 85 will develop a chronic infection. About 60 to 70 will develop chronic liver disease. About five to 20 will develop cirrhosis over a period of 20 to 30 years. Between one and five will die of liver cancer or cirrhosis.

As TChris just posted, the war on drugs encourages illicit drug use. If Parker had been able to legally get her Fetanyl or heroin, and clean needles, she wouldn't have resorted to this awful switcheroo and 6,000 ordinary citizens would not be at risk of infection with an incurable disease.

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Sarah, We Hardly Knew Ye

Proving once again that she never gave a shit about Alaska, Sarah Palin is stepping down at the end of this term. Though no specific reason was stated, according to all sources - as well as Palin herself - she is stepping down for two reasons:1) Some[...]

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http://librocrat.blogspot.com/2009/07/sarah-we-hardly-knew-ye.html

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Overnight Caption Contest

[...]

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Overnight Caption Contest (new)

[...]

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Explainin' Palin: All of The Above

It's by sheer coincidence that we'd happened to have a Sarah Palin item running earlier this afternoon at the time she announced that she was leaving Alaska's governorship. I've been on a plane for the past six hours (the flight that I was supposed to take last night got cancelled). Fortunately, it was JetBlue, so I was able to watch a lot of TV.

There seem to be three* basic theories to explain why Sarah Palin decided to quit:

1. She's simply burned out;
2. There's some kind of "other shoe dropping";
3. She's so crazy she thinks this could actually help her for 2012, 2016, etc.

The point I'd add is that I don't think these three things are mutually exclusive. In her press conference today, Palin didn't seem sure of much of anything except that she'll no longer be governor. She may have felt like being governor of Alaska had become a waste of her time when she can go about the country being a celebrity instead; she might have concerns for what the national media spotlight has done to her family; she might be worried that she's made too many enemies in the state and that sooner or later one of these mini-scandals will blow up into a bigger one ... AND she may be crazy and narcissistic enough to think this will actually help her chances for 2012.

It won't, of course. Politicians have survived and been re-elected after being stigmatized as liars, hypocrites, and flip-floppers -- but can someone who may forever be branded as a "quitter" become Commander in Chief? There's almost no way. I can't think of someone who has done something comparable to what Palin did today running for national office, let alone winning it. In her critics' imaginations, she's gone from being Dan Quayle to some permutation of Thomas Eagleton.

And today will make her critics more numerous. One gets the sense that the Republican establishment was already starting to have concerns about Palin's electability -- see particularly Charles Krauthammer's recent comments. If Palin really is still in the running for 2012, today's actions may turn those concerns into action items -- like trying to build an "inevitability" narrative around Mitt Romney, or perhaps recruiting another populist conservative into the race to split Palin's vote and ensure that she can't win on some sort of plurality basis. I happen to think that these electability concerns are wise ones, and in the long run Palin may have done the GOP a big favor. In the short run, though, it's going to be a long weekend for them in more ways than one.
___
* A fourth theory, I guess, is that she's running for Senate, but that doesn't make any sense at all. Why would she need to leave office to do that? And could she really beat Lisa Murkowski? My guess is that, after today, Palin would not only lose the primary to Murkowski but might do so by an embarrassing margin.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/07/explainin-palin-all-of-above.html

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Study: Drug War Encourages Illicit Drug Use

A sensible policy of drug regulation would treat drug use and abuse as a medical issue rather than burdening the criminal justice system with endless arrests, prosecutions, and incarcerations for conduct that primarily hurts those who voluntary engage in it. Sensible drug policy reform is fiercely resisted by unions representing prison guards and police officers whose jobs depend on continuing the ineffective status quo.

To justify the war's continuation in the face of mounting casualties and no possibility of victory, proponents of the drug war routinely claim that legalization or decriminalization of illicit drugs would encourage kids to experiment with them. The argument is based on faith, not research. A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that "tough policing of the illegal drugs market may have the perverse effect of making drugs more affordable and thereby encouraging people to use them."

[more ...]

Will reality deter the drug warriors from basing their arguments on conjecture rather than facts? Don't count on it. As the nation's police departments clamor "for an unprecedented amount of federal aid," they're not likely to admit that we would have all the cops we need (and then some) by ending the war on drugs.

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Move over Mark Sanford...

Meet the GOP's newest favorite wingnut from South Carolina, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint:

DeMint Supports Honduras Military Coup

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has come out in support of the military coup in Honduras, chastising President Obama in a statement for what he calls "a slap in the face to the people" of that country.

You can sort of understand DeMint's position here. At the rate they're going, the only way the GOP is going to get back in power anytime soon is through a military coup.

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Sarah Palin Resigns To Spend More Time IN YOUR
FACE

If Sarah Palin were a realistic, rational person, a scandal would be the only plausible explanation. A sane person expecting damaging revelations would recognize the inevitable and bow to it. And a sane person wouldn't walk away from their first term[...]

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http://firedoglake.com/2009/07/03/sarah-palin-resigns-to-spend-more-time-in-your-
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Glenn Beck gets all worked up about an obscure
French book nobody's reading

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Glenn Beck was frothing at the mouth this week -- just before he went on an obviously much-needed vacation -- about an obscure French book that is hard to obtain and which no one appears to be reading, aside from a handful of anarchist aesthetes:

While the government warns that right-wing extremists could be domestic terrorists, and The New York Times, says I could incite those crazy conservatives to violence, the extreme left is actively calling for violence!

As world economies go down the tank and unemployment continues to rise, disenfranchised people are set to explode.

The dangerous leftist book that could spark this is "The Coming Insurrection." This is a call to arms for violent revolution, authored anonymously by a French group called the Invisible Committee who want to bring down capitalism.

This started in France and spread to countries like Greece and Iceland, where people are out of work, out of money and out of patience.

Now it's coming here. The book comes out in English in the U.S. in August. I have one of the first English copies.

... Remember the media will tell you the right is the one to be feared. They do everything they can to tie any random nutjob shooting to conservatives. "The shooter was a fan of '24' ? '24' starred Jon Voight ? Jon Voight is a conservative!"

But this is a call for violence. Here is more:

"It's a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight."

The synopsis of the book describes it as "an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe... a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to spread anarchy and live communism."

A few years ago I said that Europe is on the brink of destruction. This is yet another sign that it's coming. Even in Japan where protests have been seen as taboo since the 1960s, young people angered over the economy and fear for their future ? taking to the streets, beginning to unionize. The communist party of Japan says they are getting 1,000 new members a month.

This book has not even been released in this country yet. It has been passed hand to hand and via the Internet, much like the pamphleteers in pre-revolution America. Thomas Paine was one of them. He issued a call to arms. I am not doing that. You are an idiot if you start shooting people ? all that does is delegitimize the cause. Be like Ghandi, like Martin Luther King.

But people on the extreme left are calling people to arms.

Funny thing about that. The extreme right -- the people Glenn Beck wants you to forget all about -- have actually been calling people to arms for a number of years now.

They've done it with books like The Turner Diaries and Hunter, as well as lesser-known texts such as Richard Kelly Hoskins' Vigilantes of Christendom, Robert Pummer's The Road Back to America, and Ben Klassen's The White Man's Bible. All these texts explicitly advocate the use of lethal violence on a massive scale in instituting white-supremacist rule. And they have roughly the same kind of circulation that The Coming Insurrection does.

Which is to say, they're largely relegated to the fringes. But that doesn't mean people don't act on them -- these books have in fact inspired the very kinds of acts of domestic terrorism that Beck wants to pretend away as just "isolated incidents" that have nothing, nothing at all!, to do with right-wing fearmongers like himself.

The people who read these books are very much with us. In the 1990s, they called it the militia movement or the "Patriot" movement. Now they just call it the Glenn Beck Fan Club. Some of them are the same folks who have been putting Beck's screed, Common Sense, on the bestseller list.

Hmmmmm... Can you say, "projection," people? I knew you could.

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Happy 4th of July

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's the day we take a moment to think back to those who gave their lives for our independence. It's the day we revel in the fact we are Americans. It's the day we say we are proud of our country and its people. It's the day we stop to celebrate amongst one another: white, black, man, woman, and Democratic and Republican.

Today, I ask my readers out there to think about our history of this country. Think about what we've accomplished. Think about what we've done when the chips were down. Think about what can be done now. Think about what needs to be down for our future generations.

While you light those firecrackers made in China, realize what other things we've sent there. Realize what we get back in return.

When you look in the sky tonight at the glorious colors, take a moment to dwell on what our Founding Fathers thought when they celebrated.

In 2009, we face many hurdles. We have hundreds of thousands jobless. We have more than 46 million people without health care. We have two wars where our soldiers fight for what we able to do tonight. We have homeless who have no place to turn. We have children who cannot protect themselves from the lack of caring of adults in power.

Democracy in our country has led to great things. It's time we stand behind it and push for what needs to be done. We need a public option in health care. We need jobs in America, protected from deregulated global trade. We need better leaders that care for our children's education and welfare.

As I sit back with my family tonight, dealing with my last week of work ahead of me, I wish that we can all put aside social issues for a while and get the necessary, vital changes we need accomplished.

If we do not, I fear we may not have much of an independence to celebrate in the future.

Please, be safe. Enjoy your family. Have fun. And, above all... Forget politics for one day. I will be happy to be the first.

Thank you for reading.

Read The Full Article:
http://thepoliticsofjamiesanderson.blogspot.com/2009/07/happy-4th-of-july.html

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