This story by the Washington Examiner is such a none issue. Repubs at 99% either extremely proud or moderately, but it’s a big deal that Democrats are 96%??? What the hell? 3% makes such a huge difference?

This is an example of the right playing rabble rouser.

Gallup: Republicans more proud to be American than Democrats | WashingtonExaminer.com.

Jul 4 2013

Disgusting

Now I promised I would try to stay off politics but I can’t help but make a comment on this. Whether one is Pro-Choice or Pro-life, wishing physical harm on legislature members’ daughters and others is when a person crosses a line that shouldn’t. There is no point in making comments like that, no matter what side a person’s on, because it totally takes the fight and turns it into something extreme. This is one of the analysis points I’m writing about things that are happening in this country. It’ll be opinion neutral for the most part and be written news media style. Hopefully it’ll be a good read.

The paid protesters opposing the late-term abortion ban in Texas are doing more than rallying outside the legislature against the pro-life bill. They’re threatening pro-life state legislators and their staffers.

Death threatens, harassing emails and phone calls and calls for their daughters to be raped are among the hate targeted at pro-life lawmakers from the small contingent of abortion activists upset that Texas would consider banning abortions on babies at viability.

National Review has more details:

“My favorite one was probably this female who said that she couldn’t wait to see Representative Stickland so that she could pummel my face in,” he tells me.

He brought some male supporters into the office during the day of the filibuster because he didn’t want the women who work there to be alone.

“We brought in extra people to make sure the office was going to be safe,” he says.

He tells me he was also concerned for his personal safety during the filibuster. He and a few other pro-life representatives went onto the Senate floor during the filibuster and couldn’t leave until 1:30 am because they were afraid of the crowd. Protesters in the gallery yelled threats and verbal abuse at him, he says.

“Everywhere I went, they were tweeting pictures of ‘Stickland’s in the elevator’ or ‘Stickland’s on the move,’” he says.

They couldn’t move around the Capitol without security because of safety concerns.

Jul 4 2013

Drug overdose deaths spike among middle-aged women

By MIKE STOBBE

(AP) Graphic shows national data on drug overdosing; 2c x 6 inches; 96.3 mm x 152 mm;
Full Image

ATLANTA (AP) – Overdose deaths in the U.S. are rising fastest among middle-aged women, and their drug of choice is usually prescription painkillers, the government reported Tuesday.

“Mothers, wives, sisters and daughters are dying at rates that we have never seen before,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which compiled the data.

The problem is one of the few health issues the CDC is working on that are clearly getting worse, he added.

For many decades, the overwhelming majority of U.S. overdose deaths were men killed by heroin or cocaine. But by 2010, 40 percent were women – most of them middle-aged women who took prescription painkillers.

Skyrocketing female overdose death rates are closely tied to a boom in the overall use of prescribed painkillers. The new report is the CDC’s first to spotlight how the death trend has been more dramatic among women.

The CDC found that the number and rate of prescription painkiller overdose deaths among females increased about fivefold 1999 to 2010. Among men, such deaths rose about 3 1/2 times.

Overall, more men still die from overdoses of painkillers and other drugs; there were about 23,000 such deaths in 2010, compared with about 15,300 for women. Men tend to take more risks with drugs than women, and often are more prone to the kind of workplace injuries that lead to their being prescribed painkillers in the first place, experts say.

But the gap has been narrowing dramatically.

Studies suggest that women are more likely to have chronic pain, to be prescribed higher doses, and to use pain drugs longer than men. Some research suggests women may be more likely than men to “doctor shop” and get pain pills from several physicians, CDC officials said.

But many doctors may not recognize these facts about women, said John Eadie, director of a Brandeis University program that tracks prescription-drug monitoring efforts across the United States.

The report highlights the need for “a mindset change” by doctors, who have traditionally thought of drug abuse as a men’s problem, he said. That means doctors should consider the possibility of addiction in female patients, think of alternative treatments for chronic pain, and consult state drug monitoring programs to find out if a patient has a worrisome history with painkillers.

The CDC report focuses on prescription opioids like Vicodin and OxyContin and their generic forms, methadone, and a powerful newer drug called Opana, or oxymorphone.

“These are dangerous medications and they should be reserved for situations like severe cancer pain,” Frieden said. He added that there has not been a comparable increase in documented pain conditions in the U.S. public that would explain the boom in painkiller prescriptions in the last 10 or 15 years.

Some experts said the increase in prescriptions can be traced to pharmaceutical marketing campaigns.

CDC researchers reviewed death certificates, which are sometimes incomplete. Specific drugs were not identified in every death. In others, a combination of drugs was involved, such as painkillers taken with tranquilizers.

CDC officials think more than 70 percent of the overdose deaths were unintentional.

One striking finding: The greatest increases in drug overdose deaths were in women ages 45 through 54, and 55 through 64. The rate for each of those groups more than tripled between 1999 and 2010.

In 2010, overdose deaths in those two groups of middle-aged women added up to about 7,400 – or nearly half the female total, according to CDC statistics.

It’s an age group in which more women are dealing with chronic pain and seeking help for it, some experts suggested.

Many of these women probably were introduced to painkillers through a doctor’s prescriptions for real pain, such as persistent aches in the lower back or other parts of the body. Then some no doubt became addicted, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City.

There aren’t “two distinct populations of people being helped by opioid painkillers and addicts being harmed. There’s overlap,” said Kolodny, president of a 700-member organization Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing.

Jul 4 2013

Divided We Stand (and will fall)

By Ronald Brownstein

Updated: July 3, 2013 | 6:15 a.m.
July 3, 2013 | 6:00 a.m.

It seems entirely revealing, if dispiriting, that the days before the July Fourth holiday showed Red America and Blue America pulling apart at an accelerating rate.

Of all of our national holidays, Independence Day is the one most intimately rooted in our common history and shared experience. Yet this year it arrives against a background of polarization, separation, and confrontation in the states and Washington alike. With municipal politics as the occasional exception, the pattern of solidifying agreement within the parties—and widening disagreement between them—is dominating our decisions at every level.

On almost all of our major policy choices, the common thread is that the election of 2012 did not “break the fever” of polarization, as President Obama once hoped it might. Last November, Obama became only the third Democrat in the party’s history to win a majority of the popular vote twice. But congressional Republicans, preponderantly representing the minority that voted against Obama, have conceded almost nothing to his majority—leaving the two sides at a stalemate. Meanwhile, beyond the Beltway, states that lean Democratic and those that lean Republican are separating at a frenetic pace.

Consider a few recent headlines. The Supreme Court decision upholding the lower-court invalidation of California’s Proposition 8 restored gay marriage in the nation’s largest state. It also capped a remarkable 2013 march for gay marriage through blue states, including Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island (with Illinois and New Jersey possibly joining before long). The consensus is solidifying fast enough that 2014 could see several blue-state Republican gubernatorial candidates running on accepting gay-marriage statutes as settled law. Former California Lt. Gov Abel Maldonado, a likely 2014 GOP gubernatorial contender who this week reversed his earlier opposition to support gay marriage, may be an early straw in that breeze.

The story in red states, though, remains very different. Almost all of them have banned gay marriage. Some activists believe Justice Anthony Kennedy’s embrace of equal-protection arguments in the decision striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act might enable litigation challenging those bans; but if not, it may take a very long time for the support for gay marriage among younger voters to dissolve the resistance to the idea in culturally conservative states. Absent further Supreme Court action, the nation could remain a “house divided” on gay marriage for longer than many may expect: The high court’s ruling striking down the remaining 16 state laws banning interracial marriage came in 1967—nearly two centuries after the first state had revoked its ban (Pennsylvania in 1780).

Meanwhile, as gay marriage advances in blue states, red states are competing to impose the tightest restrictions on abortion since the Supreme Court established the national right to it in Roe v. Wade. In Ohio this week, Republican Gov. John Kasich signed legislation requiring ultrasound exams before abortions, effectively cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood and making it more difficult for abortion providers to transfer patients to public hospitals. In Texas, after the dramatic filibuster by Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis temporarily disrupted his plans, Republican Gov. Rick Perry this week opened another legislative special session that is likely to ban abortion at 20 weeks and impose stringent new safety requirements that would shutter most of the state’s abortion providers. All of this follows a cascade of legislation restricting abortion in Republican-run states from Arkansas and Louisiana to Kansas and North Dakota—most of which are already facing legal challenges.

In Washington, there’s little sign of convergence. Hopes for a budget “grand bargain” are flickering. In the Senate, the two parties have worked together to pass a farm bill, and more dramatically a sweeping immigration overhaul that won support from all 54 Democrats and 14 Republicans. But House Republicans, who recently collapsed into chaos when they couldn’t pass a farm bill, are pledging to block any reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants—an indispensable component of legislation as far as Democrats are concerned. On big issues, the Supreme Court looks just as chronically divided, and the split often comes down to Republican- and Democratic-appointed justices.

All of this reveals a political system losing its capacity to create common ground between party coalitions divided along economic, racial, generational, and even religious lines. Some variation in state policy is healthy, but states are now diverging to an extent that threatens to undermine equal protection under the law. The stalemate in Congress reflects genuine differences, but the reluctance to compromise—most intractable among House Republicans—prevents us from confronting common challenges.

In all these ways, our contemporary politics is ignoring the simple truth that none of us are going away—not the cosmopolitan coasts, nor the evangelical South. Our choices ultimately come down to bridging our differences or surrendering to endemic separation in the states and stalemate in Washington. This week we celebrate the moment when the authors of the Declaration of Independence concluded they had no choice but “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” It’s an excellent opportunity to consider how ominously our own “political bands” are fraying.