Judge Sanctions Lawyer for Issuing Subpoena to Blogger Kathleen Seidel

Posted June 23rd, 2008 by David Ardia

A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has sanctioned Clifford Shoemaker, a Virginia attorney, for abusing the legal process by issuing a subpoena to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer, in which the plaintiffs Lisa and Seth Sykes sought to link exposure to mercury to their son's autism. (For more on her statements about the lawsuit, see my previous post: Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation.)

On March 24, 2008, Shoemaker, an attorney for the Sykes, served Seidel with a subpoena in connection with the Sykes v. Bayer lawsuit. The subpoena demanded that Seidel appear for a deposition on April 30, 2008, and that she produce a shockingly broad collection of information, including her bank statements, tax returns, communications with religious organizations, and personal correspondence with other bloggers.
Other Info:

1. Seidel's motion to quash
2. sanctioned under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11
3. Shoemaker's filed opposition to potential sanctions
4. Seidel filed response

The case of the missing e-mail

A federal magistrate judge on Thursday chastised the Bush administration for failing to fully answer questions related to a long-running dispute over missing White House emails. The White House is facing lawsuits from two public interest groups, Citizens for Responsibilty and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive at George Washington University, demanding that the White House restore the missing e-mails and put in place systems to prevent further e-mail losses. Administration officials were ordered to provide detailed information about the burdens involved in taking immediate actions to preserve copies of hard drive, tapes, and other media that may contain copies of the missing e-mails.

The ongoing dispute spotlights a part of the executive branch that doesn't often get much attention: its e-mail system. Two laws govern the retention of executive branch documents. The Federal Record Act requires the head of each federal agency to ensure that documents related to that agency's official business be preserved for federal archives. The Watergate-era Presidential Records Act augmented the FRA framework by specifically requiring the president to preserve documents related to the performance of his official duties. A 1993 court decision held that these laws applied to electronic records, including e-mails, which means that the president has an obligation to ensure that the e-mails of senior executive branch officials are preserved.

In 1994, the Clinton administration reacted to the previous year's court decision by rolling out an automated e-mail-archiving system to work with the Lotus-Notes-based e-mail software that was in use at the time. The system automatically categorized e-mails based on the requirements of the FRA and PRA, and it included safeguards to ensure that e-mails were not deliberately or unintentionally altered or deleted.

The Bush White House "upgrades" the e-mail system

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.

Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called "journaling," in which (to quote from a recent Congressional report) "a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees." These would be manually named and saved as ".pst" files on White House servers.

DA charges parents who prayed as daughter died

An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.

"She got sicker and sicker until she was dead," he said.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

Most parents would seek immediate medical help for a child who cannot speak, eat, drink, walk or breathe easily as was the case with Kara for about 48 hours before she died, Falstad said.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said. The couple face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

Leilani Neumann, 40, told AP previously she never expected her daughter to die. The family believes in the Bible, which says healing comes from God, but they are not crazy, religious people and have nothing against doctors, she said. They believed the key to healing "was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray," he said. The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

Police Chief Vergin said the parents once belonged to the Lighthouse Pentecostal Church but they became what he called religious "isolationists" involved in a prayer group of five people.

The most frighting quote above is "...they are not crazy religious people"; this my friends is complete loss of contact with reality scary crazy. I hope they get the maximum sentence. Murder is murder whether the weapon is a gun or religious fanaticism and stupidity.

Ono sues Expelled producers for using Lennon song

Yoko Ono has sued producers of a film starring actor Ben Stein that supports ''intelli- gent design,'' the belief that evolution was intended by an unknown being, claiming it illegally uses a song by ex-Beatle John Lennon.
Premise Media Corp. and Rampant Films didn't obtain a license to use ''Imagine,'' the song by Ono's late husband, in ''Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,'' released April 18, according to a suit filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court.
''Defendants have intentionally and willfully used the song without authorization because they knew that they would likely be unable to secure permission,'' Ono, 75, said in the complaint filed along with British record label EMI Group Plc.

Karl Rove in a violation of the Hatch act

By Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow Jr.Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 26, 2007; Page A01
Witnesses have told congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Karl Rove's political affairs office at the White House joined in a videoconference earlier this year with top GSA political appointees, who discussed ways to help Republican candidates.

A Million Texas Children between 1996-3003 Did Not Graduate

"In 2001-02, Texas schools enrolled 364,270 freshmen – and 225,756 seniors. The state's official annual dropout rate: 1 percent." (Source: The Dallas Morning News - August 31, 2003)

Hundreds of thousands of Texas students never made it to graduation from their high schools in the past seven years, but the reported dropout rates of many Texas school districts came through in small single digits.

A miracle? Hardly. More like a disgrace, a statistical sleight of hand that does more to cover up failure than demonstrate success.

The Texas ATTRITION RATE (on the right) provides a far more revealing (and harsh) portrait of what actually happens to many Texas students.

Where are those thousands of children today? Were they simply LEFT BEHIND? Discarded? Many were lost, forgotten, neglected and in some cases even PUSHED OUT. Push out the weak students and you will see test scores skyrocket.

If you were running for President or Secretary of Education, which number would make you look better, the dropout rate or the attrition rate?



Enrollments for the Houston ISD in 2001-2002

Source: The Dallas Morning News - August 31, 2003

---

Failure of No Child Left Behind

ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2008)

A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation -- a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students.

...60 percent of African-American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate
...The discrepancy between the official dropout rates, in the 2 to 3 percent range, and the actual rates can be attributed to the state's method of counting...
The study has been published in the peer-reviewed policy journal "Educational Policy Analysis Archives"

US military accused of harboring fundamentalism

...Hall was confronted by a major for holding an authorized meeting of "atheists and freethinkers" on his base. The officer threatened to discipline him and block his re-enlistment. "He said: 'You guys are being a problem and problems can be removed,'...

A campaign group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is waiting for the Pentagon to respond to a lawsuit filed in a Kansas federal court on Hall's behalf.
It alleges a "pernicious pattern and practice" of infringement of religious liberties in the military. The group's founder, former Air Force lawyer Mikey Weinstein, said he has documented 6,800 testimonies by military personnel -- nearly all of them Christians -- of sometimes punitive or humiliating attempts to make them accept a fundamentalist evangelical interpretation of Christianity.

"It violates title seven of the US code for an employer to push their Biblical world view on an employee," he said. "But it's a trillion times worse when that is not just your shift manager at Starbucks but that is your military superior."

He singles out one of the major Christian groups in the military, the Officers Christian Fellowship (OCF).

"The joint standards of conduct for the Armed Forces and military equal
opportunity policies address the freedom of religion, avoiding
discrimination because of religion."

But Weinstein argued that most personnel are "too terrified" to speak out.

"When you actually fight against them, they make your life hell," said
Hall, adding he has been passed over for promotion since launching his
lawsuit. "I can't get a leg up no matter what I do."

A former military chaplain of a prestigious US military college reported being
prevented from leading worship after disagreeing with the fundamentalist stance of other officials.

"I am not ready to say that if someone does not profess Christ as their savior that they are going to hell ... That got a lot of people angered,"...

Looks like Robertson Prediction of 'Mass Killing' was wrong.

Pat Robertson predicted ... that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during
his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian
Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it
will be something like that."
Robertson said God told him
during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions
of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place
sometime after September.

TEA Director of Science Forced to Resign

A Report of Texas Citizens for Science
by Steven Schafersman

November 29, 2007

True Reason for the Forced Resignation
Thus, it is easy to conclude that Chris was forced to resign because someone wanted her out of the TEA--not because she violated a formal written policy, but because she DID violate the preposterous and unethical verbal policy of neutrality to Creationism. I doubt that this policy is written anywhere, but I hope another FOIA request will reveal its official existence. Reporters should interview Associate Commissioner Susan Barnes about her September address to TEA staff. She may still have her notes available (unless she has shredded them, which has been the official TEA policy since...September). A reporter should read back to her what Monica Martinez wrote, and ask Associate Commissioner Barnes to explain why violating a policy that the TEA "must remain neutral" on--not publicizing or seeming to "endorse" a group that "opposes teaching creationism"--is the same as "you are not to communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the agency in any way that might compromise the transparency and/or integrity of the upcoming TEKS development and revision process." I, for one, can't see that these are the same thing, but apparently Monica Martinez and Susan Barnes think they are.

Bush War on Science Continues

GW Bush has vetoed a bill that would give NIH an additional $1 billion per year, raising the budget from $29 billion to $30 billion; saying that Congress is on a "spending spree." Yet he continues to fund a war of idiocy to the tune a over a billion a week.

The bill, which was passed by Congress last week, sought to increase NIH funding by about $1 billion from a 2007 budget of about $29 billion to a 2008 budget of about $30 billion.
In a statement released by the White House after Bush vetoed the bill, the president decried the Democrat-led Congress for engaging in what he called a "spending spree," and said that the legislative majority was "acting like a teenager with a new credit card."
The bill, H.R.3043, also sought to bolster the budgets of the departments of Labor and Education, and carried a request for a total of $150.7 billion. Since its introduction in July, Bush has said he would veto the bill because it overshot his own budget recommendations.
"We were hoping that [Bush's veto] wouldn't be the case," Carrie Wolinetz, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) spokesperson, told The Scientist. "But the threat had been there."
The NIH budget has been stagnant over the past few years, with government funding increasing by only about $1.4 billion between 2003 and 2006.
The vetoed bill also included a provision requiring
NIH-funded researchers to post the full text of their research papers on the National Library of Medicine's publicly accessible PubMed Central website within a year of publication. This provision survived an attack by Republican Senator James Inhofe in October to remain intact in the final version of the bill sent to the president.
The bill cleared the House of Representatives only three votes shy of the two-thirds majority it would have needed to avoid Bush's veto. As H.R.3043 returns to Capitol Hill, where legislators will hold a veto override vote, Wolinetz said that FASEB will continue encouraging its 80,000-strong membership to urge their legislators to support the bill and overturn the presidential veto.

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

You would almost think that Bush is working for the Terrorists, or is he really this stupid?

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; Page A01

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun
downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

A Little Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog

By Jacques Sterchi

Rue89 in partnership with La Liberté, Fribourg

Monday 17 September 2007

In 2003, University of Lausanne theology professor Thomas Römer received
a telephone call from the Elysée. Jacques Chirac's advisers wanted to
know more about Gog and Magog ... two mysterious names pronounced by George
W. Bush while he was attempting to convince France to enter the war in Iraq
at his side. In its September edition, the University of Lausanne's review,
Allez savoir, reveals this story that could seem fantastic did it not, as Allez
savoir's Editor-in-Chief Jocelyn Rochat emphasizes, reveal the religious underpinnings
of Bush's policy.

Apocalyptic prophecy: Bush would have declared to Chirac that Gog and Magog
were at work in the Middle East and that the Biblical prophecies were in the
process of being fulfilled. That was several weeks before the intervention in
Iraq. The French president, to whom the names of Gog and Magog meant nothing,
was stupefied.

In Allez savoir, Thomas Römer details: Gog and Magog are two creatures
who appear in Genesis, and especially in the most arcane chapters of the Old
Testament Book of Ezekiel. An apocalyptic prophecy of a global army giving final
battle in Israel.

...

Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.Go to Original

Bush's Holy War on Nature

By Chip Ward
September 16, 2005
...This much is clear: The Bush administration does not respect a broad American consensus that the quality of our lives is directly linked to the integrity and health of the environment. Differences in philosophy about property rights, the role of government, and the best means to change self-destructive behaviors will translate into different approaches to environmental policy -- for example, whether to curb pollution by creating market incentives or by passing tough laws. But until now Republicans did not reject the need for environmental policy altogether. What happened?
The answer is a familiar one: Bush's righteous base, the rightwing fundamentalist Christians, are having their way -- the zealots who think Revelations is the only guide to foreign policy and that Nature is a mere stage for their personal salvation drama -- men like Majority Leader Tom DeLay who have publicly proclaimed that they do not believe in evolution, or other Republican congressional leaders who got 100% ratings from the powerful Christian Coalition, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, presidential hopeful Bill Frist, Policy Chair Christopher Cox, National Leadership Chair Rob Portman, powerful senators like Mitch McConnell, Kay Hutchinson, Rick Santorum, George Allen, and many more who are, environmentally speaking, the American Taliban.

Our President himself recently declared "the jury is still out" on evolution. The administration's push to satisfy its base by devaluing and discrediting evolutionary theory has profound implications for environmental policy and law. If you don't believe in the evolutionary sciences, chances are you also don't heed or trust the ecological sciences that underlie environmental law and policy. When conservation biologists talk about keystone (or endangered) species, fundamentalists are far more likely than most Americans to listen skeptically. The value of biodiversity as a measure of ecosystem health is going to be of little concern to those who do not understand or accept the critical role that species interaction plays in keeping ecosystems resilient in the face of disturbance and stress.
In fact, fundamentalist Christians often have only contempt for ecological science, which they view as nothing more than the cover Pagans use to push a godless, nature-worshiping agenda. To many fundamentalists, enviros are the new commies. Utah's righteous patriarchal politicians cannot even utter the term "environmentalist" (usually pronounced environ-MENTAL-ist, as if it were a psychological disorder) without attaching the adjective "extreme" to the term.
If you believe that God made the world for you and instructed you to dominate it and be fruitful, then you are likely to see yourself as above and beyond the natural world. If you are God's chosen, then how can you fear that he will not provide for you no matter how large your numbers grow or what you do to your surroundings? God, after all, can change nature's laws, which are part of his "intelligent design" in the first place. So you are unlikely to fret about practicing environmental restraint or worry about environmental toxins -- righteousness being the best prophylactic against disease in a world where God's will is done.
If you believe that the world's end is imminent, then why not use it before you lose it? If you believe that when the world-ending moment arrives, you will be "raptured" away and Christ will return to rule at last, then, hey, bring it on! Those who are "left behind," as fundamentalist Tim Lehaye describes it in his bestselling novels, deserve to suffer because they failed to accept Christ as their personal savior. So the President's fundamentalist base favors the present over a future they disown.
Perhaps the greatest gap between the belief systems of fundamentalists and environmentalists is the difference between hubris and humility. Fundamentalists have a death grip on truth and do not entertain doubt; while one of the key insights of the ecological sciences is that nature may not only be more complex than we thought, but more complex than we can think. Conservation biologists respect the intricate and reciprocal nature of living systems and realize that even the most seemingly insignificant species may turn out to play an unexpected and important role in them. Such insights underlie
precautionary approaches.
According to Bush's political base, the future is theirs; nature was put here for us to use as we please; God will provide; and foolish unbelievers will be abandoned, like those desperate refugees at the New Orleans Super Dome, in a trashed and shredded world. We had our chance, but decided to listen to scientists, believe in dinosaurs, hug trees, and wring our hands over pupfish, spotted owls, and the odd centipede or two. While our jaws drop at their arrogant and reckless behaviors, they just shake their heads and chuckle condescendingly at all of our "liberal whining." It's a holy war, after all, and they are most righteous.
Bush's assault on the environment makes perfect sense once you see the bargains that drive it. The fundamentalists give Bush political power; his corporate cronies get free reign to plunder the land for their profit; and the fundamentalists get the heads of nature-worshipping enviros on an arsenic platter. The rest of us, of course, get left behind.

Chip Ward, assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System, is a political activist and leader in the struggle to keep the Great Basin Desert from becoming a nuclear waste dumping ground. He is the author of Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land (Island Press).

Copyright 2005 Chip Ward

Other Article Links:
This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.

...connected so many things (including what was happening in Iraq and here ...

...New Orleans is now a vast toxic dump (and, as at Ground Zero in New York after 9/11, a toxic cover-up is sure to follow
the city's embattled wetlands are in dismal shape; a superfund toxic waste site remains underwater; the whole area may prove an "underwater Love Canal"; parts of the Gulf of Mexico are now covered with huge, if unacknowledged, oil slicks;...

...As relief expert David Langness wrote at Juan Cole's Informed Comment website on his return from New Orleans, the city is

"under a toxic brew of foul water,...

...Cases of silenced government scientists and experts, censored reports, disbanded scientific advisory panels, and withheld evidence abound. (The National Resources Defense Council has listed dozens of examples on its website.)...

Faith Based Dominist Groups

It furthermore doesn't help when one of the main people partnering with the President on "faith-based issues" is the former head of Straight, Inc. himself.
(Of note, Sembler and Bush set up an agency similar to Florida's FACCCA as an alternative licensing board for faith-based "behaviour mod" facilities; after five years of multiple incidents of abuse at these facilities exempted from licensing (including a facility where two attempted escapees were forced into a pit
in a manner more resembling something out of Gitmo than a rehab facility) Texas finally discontinued the program--but not before people were forced into "faith-based coercion". George W. Bush has since attempted to use the failed Texas model as a nationwide model for "faith-based services".

Daniel Cooper says Bible Study is more important than doing his Job.

The head of the U.S. federal government agency that doles out benefits to disabled veterans is under fire for saying Bible study is "more important than doing [my] job."

Two organisations, Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), demanded an investigation Tuesday of Daniel Cooper, President George W. Bush's undersecretary for benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Their complaint stems from an appearance Cooper made in a fundraising video for the evangelical group Christian Embassy, which carries out missionary work among the Washington elite as part of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, "it's not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that's more important than doing the job -- the job's going to be there, whether I'm there or not."
Veterans for Common Sense and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation believe Cooper violated the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits government officials from advocating a particular religion while on the job.

They also believe Cooper violated ethics rules that prohibit government officials from using their name, picture, or title for proselytising or fundraising.

"We're very concerned about this because hundreds of thousands of veterans are waiting for their benefits while Cooper himself says that promoting his religion is more important than helping the veterans," Veterans for Common Sense's Paul Sullivan told IPS.

The Larry Craig Mess

August 31, 2007; Page A8

So now comes Idaho's Senator Larry Craig to verify one
more time Mr. Dooley's truth that "politics ain't beanbag." Were it gentle beanbag, a long parade of troubled politicos caught in cars, tidal basins, on boat decks and inside cookie jars would have been left to God's mercy and their own demons. Even in the days of smoke-filled rooms, the boys knew there were some malefactors who had strayed to that place beyond their protective reach, which is to say, into the hands of the party faithful. Senator Larry Craig is in that place.

Senator Craig's incident inside the men's room of the
Minneapolis-St. Paul airport is, at the least, bad timing on his part. His party, it might have occurred to him, had just lost control of Congress for reasons that Republican voters chose to call "corruption." The various corruptions included Representatives Mark Foley and Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay and the K Street mob, the disgrace of earmarks and bridges to nowhere and whatever else GOP voters concluded had
fallen outside the norms of established party principle.

DEA Steals $24000

If the DEA can't show better judgement in its actions, then the forfeiture act needs to be revoked. I am betting the DEA fights this tooth and nail. The scary thing is they may win. Are we still a democracy?

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A trucker has sued the Drug Enforcement Administration, seeking to get back nearly $24,000 seized by DEA agents earlier this month at a weigh station on U.S. 54 in New Mexico north of El Paso, Texas.

Anastasio Prieto of El Paso gave a state police officer at the weigh station permission to search the truck to see if it contained "needles or cash in excess of $10,000," according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the federal lawsuit Thursday.

Prieto told the officer he didn't have any needles but did have $23,700. Officers took the money and turned it over to the DEA. DEA agents photographed and fingerprinted Prieto over his objections, then released him without charging him with anything.

Border Patrol agents searched his truck with drug-sniffing dogs, but found no evidence of illegal substances, the ACLU said. The lawsuit alleges the defendants violated Prieto's right to be free of unlawful search and seizure by taking his money without probable cause and by fingerprinting and photographing him.

"Mere possession of approximately $23,700 does not establish probable cause for a search or seizure," the lawsuit said.

It said Prieto pulled into the weigh station about 10:30 a.m. Aug. 8 and was let go about 4 p.m.

DEA agents told Prieto he would receive a notice of federal proceedings to permanently forfeit the money within 30 days and that to get it back, he'd have to prove it was his and did not come from illegal drug sales.

They told him the process probably would take a year, the ACLU said.

The ACLU's New Mexico executive director, Peter Simonson, said Prieto needs his money now to pay bills and maintain his truck. The lawsuit said Prieto does not like banks and customarily carries his savings as cash.

"The government took Mr. Prieto's money as surely as if he had been robbed on a street corner at night," Simonson said. "In fact, being robbed might have been better. At least then the police would have treated him as the victim of a crime instead of as a perpetrator."

Write the DEA here:

Drug Enforcement Administration
Information Services Section
700 Army-Navy Drive
Arlington, VA 22202

Other Links:

DEA official web site
The History of the DEA from 1973 to 1998
Agency of Fear - The History of the origins of the DEA in the Nixon White House
Results of Prohibition The financial costs of drug use and drug prohibition in the US, impact on levels of drug use and prices.
A response to the DEA web site
"98 Percent Of All Domestically Eradicated Marijuana Is "Ditchweed," DEA Admits", NORML News Archive, 7 September 2006. Retrieved on 2007-03-27.
Major Studies of Drugs and Drug Policy Full text of major government commission reports on the effects of drug enforcement
The Drug Hang-Up by Rufus King A history of the drug laws with special emphasis on the predecessors to the DEA
DEA Watch - A dissenting view of the DEA
Drug Enforcement Administration Meeting Notices and Rule Changes from The Federal Register RSS Feed
DEA Lookup.com Commercial DEA number database search service

HIV Denial

'HIV denial' is costing lives

11:39 27 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service

AIDS is caused by HIV; it's a fact established beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet many beg to differ, blaming it instead on social causes, from poverty to promiscuity. South African president Thabo Mbeki is perhaps the most famous HIV denialist, with tragic consequences for his country's fight against AIDS. HIV denial is also flourishing worldwide on the internet and it is costing lives.
According to a new analysis, HIV denial is remarkably similar to other anti-scientific ideologies such as creationism, anti-vaccine movements and even Holocaust denial (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040256).
For example, HIV denialists claim that the idea that HIV causes AIDS is backed by an orthodoxy, or conspiracy, that makes money selling HIV drugs; that science is based on faith, rather than evidence, and that their ideas are on the verge of acceptance. They point to gaps in the science, back-pedalling as those gaps fill up. The study calls for scientists to fight back.

Bush and the Global Warming Case

Court Rules Against Bush Administration in Global Warming Case:

Federal Judge Orders Production of Suppressed

Scientific Reports on Global Warming Impacts

OAKLAND, Calif.–The Bush administration was rebuked today by a federal judge for suppressing scientific reports on the impacts of global warming on the United States. In response to a lawsuit brought last year by conservation organizations, Federal District Court Judge Saundra Armstrong issued an order finding the Bush administration in violation of the Global Change Research Act of 1990 for failing to produce an updated Research Plan and a National Assessment as required by the statute.
“This administration has denied and suppressed the science of global warming at every turn,” said Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the attorneys arguing the case. “Today’s ruling is a stern rebuke of the administration’s head-in-the-sand approach to global warming.”

The Research Plan and National Assessment required by the Global Change Research Act are intended to be the preeminent documents guiding federal research and policy-making on issues related to global warming. The Research Plan guides all federal climate research, while the National Assessment serves to provide an understandable summary of global warming impacts on the environment, economy, human health and human safety of the United States and is to by used by Congress and federal agencies in setting policy and responding to global warming.
The last National Assessment was issued in late 2000 under the Clinton administration. Its use and dissemination was suppressed by the Bush administration, and the required update in 2004 was never produced. The Research Plan was required by law to be updated in 2006 but also has never been produced.

The Court ordered the Bush administration to issue the draft overdue Research Plan by March 1, 2008, with a final 90 days thereafter, and the National Assessment by May 31, 2008.

“Knowledge is the key to effective action,” said Danielle Fugere, global warming program director for Friends of the Earth. “Congress knew this when it required the best minds in our government to conduct a National Assessment documenting the impacts of global warming on the U.S. Today’s ruling will help make that information available.”

In April 2005, at the request of Senators John Kerry and John McCain, the U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated the Bush administration’s failure to produce a 2004 National Assessment. It concluded that 1) the administration “did not submit a scientific assessment in November 2004, 4 years after the previous assessment, as required by the [Global Change Research] act,” 2) the administration expressly refuses to complete a single National Assessment, and 3) the White House’s piecemeal approach lacks an “explicit plan or…assessing the effects of global change on the eight areas enumerated in the act: the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity. “From muzzling NASA’s top climate scientist to political cronies in the White House editing climate science reports, the Bush administration has repeatedly tried to obscure and deny the science, while attempting to run out the clock on his administration,” said John Coequyt, energy policy analyst with Greenpeace.

Scientific research continues to indicate that rapid global warming from human production of greenhouse gases threatens every aspect of society, from our economy and public health to water availability and biological diversity. Recent scientific literature documents the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets at a rate faster than predicted. There is also evidence that the Arctic permafrost is beginning to melt, which will result in massive emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s leading
climate scientist, has warned that just 10 more years on current greenhouse gas emissions trajectories will commit the world to large-scale, disastrous climate impacts.

Today’s court ruling comes in the case Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, Inc. v. Brennan, et al.,
(Case No. 06-CV-7062 (SBA) (N.D. Cal.)). Senator Kerry and Congressman Jay Inslee filed an amicus brief and moved to intervene in support of plaintiffs in the case.