Latest News!Written By Comment Count Comment Last Three March 06, 2010
Chuck Floyd
Not only are the Democrats trying to destroy our health care system, but they are trying to institute new policies that will kill Americans. Liberal members of Congress must stay out of the health care policy decision-making process and let doctors and medical professionals control the medical policies. Our blood supply and donation system will be unsafe and in crisis if Senator Kerry and others allow gay men to donate blood into the system.
They are pushing legislation to eliminate the lifetime ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men. This group is the most dangerous due to the high infection rate for AIDS and HIV. "Healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy," Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said in a letter to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. "We live in a very different country than we did in 1983,when gay and bisexual men were permanently "deferred" from giving blood, due to the HIV/AIDS crisis." The letter asked the FDA to consider using the same deferral policies with men who have sex with men (MSM) that apply to heterosexuals who engage in high-risk behavior - usually a 12-month deferral. This would mean that a gay or bisexual man could donate blood if he had not had sex with a man in the past 12 months. Oh really--so a gay man will count the months he has not had sex so he can donate blood? The senators' letter to the FDA comes a week after the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) released a report on why the lifetime ban on MSM blood donations is punitive, unfair and unnecessary. "We don't want to increase the risk to the nation's blood supply," said Joseph Wardenski, lead author of the GMHC report and a former associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell law firm. "We would like to reduce discrimination, and we would like a blood-donor pool that's large enough to ensure that there's a safe and sufficient blood supply, particularly in times of emergency," he said. Senators are more interested in a policy rather than the safety of all Americans who need blood transfusions. When it comes to pathogens transmitted in the blood supply, "100 percent of the risk is borne by the recipient" and none is borne by the donor, said Mark Skinner, president of the World Federation of Hemophilia. Blood-donor rules are discriminatory by design, Mr. Skinner said. But the rules are grounded in science and intended to protect the end users, not target a group, he said, noting that hemophiliacs like himself can never give blood. "It really isn't even a gay issue because lesbians are not excluded unless they fall into other risk categories," Mr. Skinner said. The lifetime ban on MSM donations was established because in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic a major share of cases involved transmission via blood transfusion. However, transmissions with HIV-infected blood still occur, and the number of "bad units" would increase if the MSM deferral was changed, Dr. Andrew I. Dayton told an FDA workshop in March 2006. His computer models found that if MSM were deferred for five years, about 1,430 HIV-infected units would enter the blood supply in the first year of the new policy; with a one-year deferral, the number of infected units would "about double," to 2,780, Dr. Dayton said. This "small but definite increased risk" is part of the reason the FDA has upheld the MSM ban several times, most recently in 2006. MSM have an HIV prevalence "60 times higher than the general population, 800 times higher than first-time blood donors, and 8,000 times higher than repeat blood donors," the agency added. Other countries that currently ban MSM from blood donations are Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland and the Netherlands. Hong Kong also bans them. Still, gay rights groups have long been fighting to change blood-donor rules, and several countries have relaxed their policies. On March 1, Sweden began allowing MSM to give blood if they have not had sex with a man in the past 12 months. So what is more important to the liberal members of Congress---safety of our blood supply or promoting more homosexual policies? -
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May 06, 2009
Chuck Floyd
Today, President Obama said that he will seek to extend the controversial D.C. school voucher program until all 1,716 participants have graduated from high school, although no new students will be accepted, according to an administration official who has reviewed budget details scheduled for release tomorrow.
Wow!!! He wants to send his kids to a private school, but he does not want other black and minority kids to receive the benefit of a private education. He wants the kids in DC to attend a poorly run public education system. His decision is not about helping the kids in the DC Public School System, but about protecting the unions and trashing the voucher program. Why is this program called the Opportunity Scholarship Program? Maybe it should be called the Education Termination Program. All of the parents in DC should know that it is the Democratic led Congress and its union allies who have killed this program. The budget documents, which expand on the fiscal 2010 blueprint that Congress approved last month by outlining Obama's priorities in detail, would provide $12.2 million for the Opportunity Scholarship Program for the 2009-2010 school year. The new language also would revise current law that makes further funding for existing students contingent on Congress's reauthorization of the program beyond its current June 2010 expiration date. Under the Obama proposal, further congressional action would not be necessary, and current students would automatically receive grants until they finish school. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had told reporters that it didn't make sense "to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," but Democrats effectively terminated the program by requiring its reauthorization. Obama must now convince Democratic lawmakers to endorse a gradual phase out by continuing to include grant funding in future appropriation bills. The voucher program was created in 2003 and is a Republican favorite, providing low-income students with a maximum $7,500 grant to attend a private or parochial school. All students come from households with incomes below 185 percent of the poverty line, and 8,000 students entered a lottery to participate. But liberal education groups, including the National Education Association, have argued that the experimental program is poorly administered and that voucher recipients have not performed measurably better in their new schools. In a March 6, 2009 letter to Obama, the NEA president Dennis Van Roekel called the D.C. program "an ongoing threat to public education in the District of Columbia" and urged Obama to "use your voice to help eliminate this threat" by opposing "any efforts to extend this ineffective program." Why is a voucher program that works a "threat" to the DC school system? Does it challenge the parents and students to seek a better educational program? Does it show the ineffective public school system for what it is? Where is Reverend Al or Jesse when the issue deals with reverse discrimination by the Democrat Party? -
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