Saturday, January 18, 2025
Few Approve Of Some Trump Nominees
The chart above is from an AP / NORC Poll -- done between January 9th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,147 adults, with a 3.7 point margin of error.
What Pregnant Texas Women Can Do To protect Themselves
The following is part of an article in CourierTexas.com:
“It’s like a knife straight to your stomach,” Dr. Todd Ivey, a Houston-based OB-GYN at an academic hospital, told Courier Texas about a third woman dying in the state during a miscarriage.
“It’s just like, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to do something to stop this. Pregnancy is high-risk enough without putting all these complications on top of it.”
The “complications” that Ivey is warning Texas women about are the state’s two abortion bans, which outlaw abortions in Texas from the moment of conception.
The laws impose such harsh penalties on doctors that they are “terrified that they’re going to be criminalized,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas-based OB-GYN.
And why wouldn’t they be terrified when they face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion that’s considered illegal? They’ll also be stripped of their medical licence, have to pay a $100,000 fine, and can also be sued civilly by anyone who wants to claim a bounty of $10,000 if they can prove a doctor provided an abortion. . . .
Young women who are having complications miscarrying can appear healthy before getting “sick very quickly,” Ivey explained.
How women can protect themselves
“If you are experiencing serious symptoms while miscarrying, you have to move very quickly to prevent (your) organs from failing,” Ivey said.
And while only three Texas women have been documented to have died from miscarriages since the state’s abortion ban has been in place, the number of Texas women who died from pregnancy or labor complications soared 56% from 2019 to 2022, according to a study by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.
Kaplan said he advises pregnant mothers in Texas to pack a “to go bag” so that “if you need to get out of this state to get the care you need, you’ll be ready to go. Always be thinking — if something were to go wrong, where am I headed outside of Texas.”
But what can a pregnant woman who can’t quickly leave Texas do if local hospitals or urgent care centers don’t appear to be taking the risk to their lives seriously?
“Go to the biggest city near you and go to the downtown-ist hospital and don’t care what it looks like,” Binford said. ”They have the most volumes of deliveries and with volume come pregnancy complications and that means experience in handling them.”
Binford also advised that hospitals affiliated with medical schools will have established ethics committees that will include a lawyer and that committee members will be reachable quickly if a doctor is unsure about whether they can go ahead with a procedure to remove a fetus from a woman’s body.
Texas health lawyer Leah Stewart, who advises doctors and hospitals about the abortion laws, agreed that if a woman thinks she is having a severe miscarriage or another dangerous complication like an ectopic pregnancy or if her water breaks long before viability, then she should go to a large urban hospital.
They see “every single thing that goes wrong … and are better equipped to connect the right provider and give the woman standard care.”
And if you aren’t getting the attention you need quickly, she added, “You have to keep ramping up your fit throwing.”
“You don’t think it’s going to happen to you,” said Ryan Hamilton, a Dallas-area father whose wife nearly died when she miscarried with what would have been their second child at 13 weeks pregnant.
After multiple visits to medical centers over three days and three rounds of treatment with misoprostol, Hamilton’s wife passed out unconscious on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.
She only survived because Hamilton raced her to a hospital ER for treatment.
“”Women are dying… under the circumstances we went through.. If I wouldn’t have been home to find my wife, she would have been one of those women… I could have lost her….it’s like, ‘oh my God, I really could have.’ That’s reality and that’s hard,” Hamilton added.
Friday, January 17, 2025
Independents Far Outnumber Both Democrats And Republicans
The chart is from the Gallup Poll -- done in 2024 of a nationwide sample of 14,162 adults, with a 1 point margin of error.
About 217,000 Workers Filed For Unemployment Last Week
The Labor Department released their weekly unemployment report on Thursday. It showed about 217,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending on January 11th. Here is the official Labor Department statement:
In the week ending January 11, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 217,000, an increase of 14,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 2,000 from 201,000 to 203,000. The 4-week moving average was 212,750, a decrease of 750 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 500 from 213,000 to 213,500.
President Biden Warns About The Impending Oligarchy
I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.
More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again. . . .
powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit. We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future, the future of our children and our grandchildren. We must keep pushing forward, and push faster. There is no time to waste. It is also clear that American leadership in technology is unparalleled, an unparalleled source of innovation that can transform lives. We see the same dangers in the concentration of technology, power and wealth.
You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. . . .
You know, in the years ahead, it’s going to be up to the president, the presidency, the Congress, the courts, the free press, and the American people to confront these powerful forces. We must reform the tax code. Not by giving the biggest tax cuts to billionaires, but by making them begin to pay their fair share.
We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics. We need to enact an 18-year time limit, term limit, time and term, for the strongest ethics — and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court. We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress. We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is not limit — it is not absolute. And it shouldn’t be.
And in a democracy, there is another danger — that the concentration of power and wealth. It erodes a sense of unity and common purpose. It causes distrust and division. Participating in our democracy becomes exhausting and even disillusioning, and people don’t feel like they have a fair shot. We have to stay engaged in the process. I know it’s frustrating. A fair shot is what makes America America. Everyone is entitled to a fair shot, not a guarantee, just a fair shot, an even playing field. Going as far as your hard work and talent can take you.
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