Just Plain Mean

WINDERMERE, Fla.--Next time, Eddie Dillard won't wear flip-flops.

Dillard, a 29-year-old Ron Paul supporter from this suburb near Orlando, arrived to vote at his precinct at Winderemere Baptist Church early Tuesday morning. Pulling into the parking lot, Dillard noticed a man outside the polling place with a Gingrich sign. He decided to run home, slip into his "Ron Paul Rocks America" T-shirt, grab a "Ron Paul 2012" sign from his garage, and return to give his candidate some representation outside the precinct after he cast his vote.

Dillard found a quiet spot along a sidewalk lined with tiny American flags and held up his sign. Little did he know, Newt Gingrich had chosen that very spot to make his first Primary Day campaign stop.

When Gingrich's bus pulled up, Dillard stood silently holding his sign and watched the news-media horde swamp the candidate. Gingrich stepped down from the bus and made a beeline for Dillard. He stopped in front of Dillard and his sign and parked himself for a round of handshaking and pictures with voters. The placement couldn't have been worse. There was Gingrich, standing with his wife Callista at their first event of the day, and a giant Ron Paul sign floated inches from their crowns.

Noticing the awkward optics, Gingrich aides and security personnel swarmed Dillard, trying to intimidate him into moving. One of Gingrich's security agents stepped in front of him. When Dillard didn't budge, the agent lifted his heeled shoe over Dillard's bare foot and dug the back of it into his skin, twisting it side-to-side like he was stomping out a cigarette. Shocked, Dillard kept his ground and took a picture of the agent with his phone, which was quickly knocked out of his hand. Dillard slipped off his flip-flop to pick up the phone with his foot, and a Gingrich supporter kicked the sandal away.

"Don't kick me!" Dillard said to the man who knocked away his sandal. More members of Gingrich's security retinue approached, shoving their shoulders and chests in front of him.

"Just block him!" a Gingrich campaign aide said. "Everyone step on his toes!"

Gingrich supporters handed a "Newt 2012" yard sign up to the front to put in front of Dillard's Paul sign. The two signs, zipping back and forth inches from Gingrich's head, circled each other in the air like fighter jets in a dogfight.

When the candidate finished taking pictures with voters, furious Gingrich aides grilled Dillard.

"If we did this to you, you guys would be furious," said an aide before stomping back toward the bus. "They have no class. No class."

As Gingrich pulled away, Dillard looked down at his foot. With the adrenaline pumping, he hadn't noticed the pain, but now it was starting to sink in. A bruise was forming, and there was a cut mark where the security agent had dug in his heel.

"That was really something," Dillard said afterwards. "My heart's racing. Not what I expected to happen today."

Anger brings women no closer to parity

Even today, society responds with fear and dismissal

By Anna Holmes, Thursday, January 26,10:24 PM

There’s a moment in John H. Richardson’s August 2010 Esquire profile of Newt Gingrich in which a former wife of the political comeback artist and serial adulterer is described as having “shockingly little bitterness.” Later, the author is more explicit: Marianne Gingrich is “not angry at all.”

Richardson, of course, is talking about the dramatic and humiliating end to Marianne’s marriage of 18 years, the details of which were resurrected during a brief media tour last week, just as her ex-husband was surging in the polls.

Marianne Gingrich’s media appearances seemed calculated to deliver a devastating, if not entirely fatal blow to her ex-husband. (They didn’t have much of an effect: The former House speaker went on to win the South Carolina primary and is, of this writing, hot on Mitt Romney’s tail in Florida.)

They also felt strange and dissonant, at odds with her professed equanimity toward her ex. I have a hard time believing that a woman who devoted herself to the care and feeding of an ambitious, raging megalomaniac for close to two decades only to be cast aside for a younger, blonder model— a few months after a devastating diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, no less — would not be “angry at all.”

No doubt Marianne Gingrich is a more forgiving, pious woman than I. But it’s also likely that she’s keenly aware that female anger simply doesn’t sell, that it is regularly used to discredit and dismiss serious and real frustrations by women. In the myriad of personal and professional ways females have achieved parity with men over the decades, freedom of expression is not one of them.

‘The Obamas’

The issue of female anger, and the learned, delicate dance of communicating dissatisfaction while not coming off as a bitter complainer, has been on my mind ever since the Jan. 10 publication of “The Obamas.” Despite its title, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s much-discussed and ultimately disappointing book is less a sweeping portrait of a high-profile modern marriage than a pixelated snapshot of one member of that marriage: first lady Michelle Obama.

Many, myself included, found Kantor’s characterization of the first lady frustrating. Michelle Obama is often presented as a reactive, not active, participant — in her marriage and in the White House. To be fair, the limitations of the office have a lot to do with this. (As columnist Kathleen Parker pointed out on Jan. 13, if the first lady gets frustrated from time to time, who can blame her?) But Kantor’s repetition of Obama’s alleged resentments gives one the sense that the first lady is in a state of perpetual annoyance. Salon’s Joan Walsh described the book as “problematizing” Michelle. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien charged Kantor with portraying Michelle’s stint as 45th FLOTUS as “akin to being stuck on a chain gang.” The day of the book’s publication, Michelle Obama was prompted to respond to its characterizations in an interview with “CBS This Morning’s” Gayle King, explaining that rumors of interpersonal dramas and dissatisfaction were greatly exaggerated, and that “people have tried to paint [a picture] of me since the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”

Although Kantor denies that she depicted the first lady as an angry black woman, her assertion that there’s no suggestion of animus in the book rings a bit hollow. It conveniently ignores societal taboos against expressions of female frustration or rage, and the fact that the range of acceptable female emotions does not include animosity or enmity. It also skirts, perhaps inadvertently, real stereotypes about black women, what Tulane professor and MSNBC contributor Melissa V. Harris-Perry, in her new book, “Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America,” calls “the myth of black women’s emasculating anger.”

“This stereotype does not acknowledge black women’s anger as a legitimate reaction to unequal circumstances,” writes Harris-Perry, adding that this falsehood nonetheless leads many black women to “feel pressured to calibrate their directness and assertiveness . . . to make the men in their lives comfortable with and confident in their manhood.” (According to Kantor, Michelle’s husband is so intimidated by her potential disapproval that he enlists his advisers to pass on bad news to her.)

Deep roots

The fear and dismissal of female anger along both gender and racial lines, has roots that go deep — “It is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman,” alleges Proverbs 21:19. (Studies suggest that, unlike men, women who express anger or lose their tempers in the workplace are seen as less competent and therefore less valued.) Females learn to curb their hostilities from a young age, and when female aggression is deployed, it has to be tiptoed around, gussied up with a shiny coat of lip gloss, an updo and a wink or, as evidenced in many a junior high school hallway, communicated passively, along back channels and in whispers.

What is all the more infuriating about such prohibitions are the breathtaking hypocrisies they contain. Sometimes it seems that those most likely to mock anger as a means of dismissing and silencing legitimate female claims of dissatisfaction are those most likely to utilize the politics of resentment and victimization for personal or ideological gain.

Take Newt Gingrich. On Jan. 19, the same day that this newspaper published an interview with Marianne Gingrich reiterating the trajectory of her marriage, the Republican presidential candidate enlisted an adviser to undermine his ex-wife by describing her as “probably very bitter.” Later that evening, when Gingrich was asked about the allegations at a debate moderated by CNN’s John King, he refused to entertain or engage the issue.

It was stunning: Instead of graciously acknowledging that the split with Marianne had been difficult or painful, instead of expressing regrets about the role he played in it or allowing that his version of events differed from that of his ex-wife, he all but called Marianne a liar and launched into a self-righteous tirade about his own victimization at the hands of the mainstream media. The assembled South Carolinian crowd ate it up.

Lose the guilt

That the first lady of the United States felt compelled to defend supposedly unflattering characterizations is unfortunate but not entirely discouraging. The CBS interview is the first time Michelle Obama has made explicit, public reference to accusations of ungratefulness and unhappiness, often racially based, that have dogged her for years. The best defense, after all, is a good offense. As writer Litsa Dremousis asserted in “I’m Mad at You Because You’re an Idiot, Not Because I’m a Woman,” a recent and highly trafficked post on the women’s Web site Jezebel, it’s “time for more men to understand our behavior isn’t aberrant, and for more women not to feel ‘guilty’ for not staying in the narrow range of traditionally accepted emotional responses.” (Full disclosure: I used to edit the site.)

On Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren did just that. The Senate candidate and Harvard professor, appearing on “The Daily Show” to discuss the state of the American economy, didn’t skip a beat after her ire over corporate lobbying in Washington was called into question by host Jon Stewart. “For a second, it does seem like you’re a little mad at me,” interjected Stewart, leaning away in apparent discomfort with the zeal on display.

Warren responded by tilting her head to the side — as if to say, “I’ve heard that one before” — then delved into an animated discussion of Chinese vs. American infrastructure.

Stewart didn’t interrupt her that way again.

DISRESPECT

She helped America to see that all black women are not ghetto fabulous. 

We’re not all single, not all on welfare,

not all uneducated.

By Krissah Thompson , Tuesday, January 24,1:10 AM

As black women watch Michelle Obama on the national stage, they search — sometimes nervously — for nuances often lost on the larger culture. How she handles criticism, how she raises her children, even her style of dress, has the potential to counter negative stereotypes.


In a survey, nearly eight out of 10 black women said they personally identify with first lady Michelle Obama.
“She is mainstreaming to the world what a lot of us already know about ourselves,” says Dacenta Grice, a 37-year-old black woman who works as a physician assistant in Atlanta. “She reinforces the reality that so many of us live. She is a black woman who just seems fantastic in her own right, who just seems like every day people and is relatable.”

In a nationwide survey conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, black women described themselves as relating to Michelle Obama and sensing that she understands them. Nearly eight out of 10 black women say they personally identify with the first lady, and when asked to give a one-word description of Obama, among the words most commonly used were “intelligent,” “strong” and “classy.”

In follow-up interviews, black women say the first lady’s racial and gender identity are essential to the deep connection they feel they have to her. They call her a role model, someone familiar to them — like a sister or aunt.

That emotional stake makes watching Obama navigate the world stage both “thrilling and terrifying,” says Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor of political science at Tulane University who has written about the first lady’s impact on black women.

“Every time she flawlessly performs her role as first lady just by being who she is, she shows how extraordinary and exceptional we are,” says Harris-Perry, who is in her late 30s. “It is really fun to watch. It feels like, yes! Oh, this can never be denied.

“But every time she is booed at a NASCAR rally, the terrifying reality emerges that it will take so little for the love and admiration of Michelle Obama to go away. Anything she does that is construed as negative or stereotype-reinforcing will undoubtedly be held against us.”

In fact, the positive views of Michelle Obama cut across racial lines — with three-fourths of white women and two-thirds of white men saying they have a favorable impression of her. Other sharp contrasts do emerge in the Post-Kaiser poll between black and white women’s opinions of the first lady. Nearly nine in 10 black women say that the first lady understands their problems, compared with about half of white women. And nearly nine in 10 black women say she shares their values, compared with about six in 10 white women.

The importance black women place on the first lady’s racial identity is not universally shared, and some whites described her race as irrelevant.

“If I do consider her race — which I don’t do, to be quite honest — it’s really not a factor,” says Tracy Lynch, 42, a white freelance writer who longs to sit in her backyard and have a glass of wine with Obama as their kids frolic on the playground. “If I do consider her race, it’s more that I say, ‘Thank God my kids are a part of this history.’ ”

About four in 10 black women say their overall impression of black women has improved because of Obama, compared with fewer than one in seven white women. Some black women who said Obama had changed their view described her as being an alternative to racial stereotypes that regularly reach American homes through reality TV and other pop-culture programming. In the Post-Kaiser survey, which included interviews with more than 800 black women, more than half of black women without a college education say Obama has changed their overall impression of black women, compared with two out of 10 black women with college degrees.

The history-making marvel of a black family taking residence in the White House receded from the headlines soon after Barack Obama took the oath of office and got to work. But black women say they are still marveling.

When asked by students in South Africa last summer whether she felt pressure being the first black woman to serve as first lady, Michelle Obama described it as “a deep, deep responsibility.”

“I want to be good because this is a big job, and it’s a big, bright light,” she said. “And you don’t want to waste it. I’m constantly thinking, ‘How do I use this light?’ ”

Drawing attention

Attention has been heaped upon Obama, both negative and positive. Everything she does has drawn intense interest — from which designer clothes she wears to the programs she has promoted. One of her signature initiatives, Let’s Move, which is focused on fighting childhood obesity, has had a starring role on the children’s network Nickelodeon. Beyonce wrote a special tune for it.

The first lady also has drawn attention to schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, visiting Anacostia High School in the District twice and including on international trips question-and-answer sessions with low-income students. She also has made mentoring one of her areas of focus, holding a luncheon at the White House for girls from several area schools, including Banneker High in the District and Wootton in Rockville.

Along with Latin night and country night, Obama has hosted Earth, Wind & Fire and Stevie Wonder in the East Wing. The first lady screened Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” for about 50 guests in 2010. And last week, she attended Black Entertainment Television’s annual awards program, BET Honors, taking the stage with poet Maya Angelou, who calls Obama “the real deal.”

“She is a lady, and by that I do not mean in money or education or even power,” Angelou says, “but she has grace. She is meaningful to all women.”

Fashion magazines have tracked her outfits and labeled her a “fashion icon,” comparing her to former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Her favorable rating in the latter part of her husband’s term rivals that of recent first ladies. Seventy-three percent of Americans have a favorable view of Obama. At a similar time in her husband’s tenure, 66 percent of registered voters had a favorable view of Laura Bush; 32 percent had a favorable view of Hillary Clinton; 73 percent had a favorable view of Barbara Bush and 70 percent said the same of Nancy Reagan.

And yet, says Harris-Perry, the political scientist, Michelle Obama has had to contend with the kind of stereotypical depictions that have long been the bane of black women throughout history: black women as hypersexual, as bad mothers, as angry, as mouthy. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) was overheard twice commenting on the first lady’s posterior. He later apologized. During the 2008 presidential campaign, she was depicted in a satiric New Yorker magazine cover as an Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting radical. Fox News commentators said she looked angry as she campaigned in ’08.

Since the mid-1990s, academics have been studying implicit bias, or the ways in which negative racial images and stereotypes shape people’s biases without their awareness.

Now researchers have begun studying the impact the Obamas have had on changing attitudes and whether any changes will last.

“If you are white and male with little contact with black women and you are seeing multiple representations over time that are negative, seeing one black woman counter to stereotype — who you have no hope of meeting — is not as likely to help you overcome it,” says Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney and policy advocate who has studied bias.

Caren Goldberg, whose research at American University focuses on diversity and discrimination, is more hopeful. “Any time there is a successful individual who belongs to a group of which negative stereotypes are held, it makes tiny dents. It sort of chips away at it,” she says. “In the case of Michelle Obama, who is in this very influential position, it is human nature for her success to reflect more positively on the group.”

Interviews with black women seem to support Goldberg’s view. Ama Saran, a 63-year-old doctoral student who lives in Upper Marlboro, calls Obama the “titular head of all good-looking, smart, high-earning black women. We look at her and say, ‘Look at our daughter — doesn’t she make us proud?’ ”

Obama, however, has not made much of her elite education or legal credentials while serving as first lady. Instead, she describes herself as “mom-in-chief” and has poured her time and attention into a program to combat childhood obesity, which she says she was inspired to do when she realized her own daughters were not eating enough healthful foods. Another of her initiatives has been to help military families.

Corianne Cowan, a 29-year-old mother and fitness instructor, finds Obama’s approach to motherhood inspiring and says the first lady has changed the way she sees herself. Cowan, who is black and lives in an integrated neighborhood in Atlanta’s suburbs, says she identifies with the first lady all the more because she’s African American.

“I can feel overwhelmed. How do you create some balance and still do what needs to be done in terms of being a parent and paying bills? I look at her and say you can do what you need to do and take care of you and you can still take care of your children and handle business,” says Cowan. “She shows that it’s not impossible.”

Increasing visibility

Leola Johnson, associate professor and chair of the media and cultural studies department at Macalester College, says the presence of Michelle Obama in the White House has encouraged some black women to consider broader possibilities for themselves.

“Michelle Obama has increased the visibility of black women, and sometimes that’s enough to make you redefine and think about yourself and your place — as opposed to the days when very rarely would you see African Americans in the public sphere like you do routinely now,” she says.

Trisha Goodman, who lives in Arnold, Md., says having a black first family carries special meaning for her and many of her friends at the church she attends. After a recent Bible study session, they discussed all the ways Obama has changed the way others see black women and how they see themselves.

“In everything she has gone through just being the first lady, she’s been graceful, elegant, very supportive of her husband . . . and she always has a smile. That would be the opposite of the angry black woman,” says Goodman, 40. “She helped America to see that all black women are not ghetto fabulous. . . . We’re not all single, not all on welfare, not all uneducated.”

Daphne Valerius calls Obama a “poster woman.”

 “For a long time all we had was Oprah,” says Valerius, 30, a filmmaker who has made a documentary exploring whether negative media portrayals are harming the self-image of women of color.

She met Obama briefly when her film, “Souls of Black Girls,” got her an invitation to a White House screening of the motion picture “For Colored Girls.”

Margaret Hawkins, a Los Angeles security officer in her late 50s, thinks the attention heaped upon the first lady, whom she admires, comes at the exclusion of unsung black women — like those who teach in rough neighborhoods, serve on city councils or run businesses.

“When you look at our history and see the role of African American women, it should not be surprising at all to see a Michelle Obama, but for many it is,” says Hawkins, who is active locally in the Service Employees International Union. “We have powerful African American women in leadership everywhere, but people are not paying attention to them.”

It’s hard not to notice Obama — first ladies make news and appear on the covers of magazines.

Two years ago, Judy Jourdain-Earl, a nurse and diversity facilitator who lives in Montgomery County, was sitting in the audience as Obama gave the commencement address at Spelman College, a historically black women’s university. Tears streamed down Jourdain-Earl’s face.

“Just listening to her tell her story, seeing her being who she is, moved me,” says Jourdain-Earl. “She knows who she is and whose shoulders she’s standing on.”

For other black women, much of Obama’s power derives from her simple familiarity.

They feel a deep empathy with the challenges of her life — being in the public eye when your hair is permed or the special dynamics of an African American intergenerational family or dealing with being called “angry” when you know you were just being direct.

“She is so unbelievably ordinary even in her specialness,” says Harris-Perry. “She is brown-skinned and she’s shaped like a black woman. She has regular black-girl hair. She’s just there looking like a sistah. Part of what she means is she gives us the ability to imagine America through ourselves.”

Polling Manager Peyton Craighill contributed to this report.

Semper Fi

Film examines Camp Lejeune tragedy

WATER MAY HAVE BEEN TOXIC Marine Corps failed to study health risks
By Darryl Fears, Sunday, January 22,1:59 AM

Mike Partain didn’t believe the rumors about a place called Baby Heaven until he visited a Jacksonville, N.C., graveyard and wandered into a section where newborns were laid to rest.

Surrounded by hundreds of tiny marble headstones, he started to cry. A documentary film crew that followed him for a story about water contamination at Camp Lejeune heard his whimpers through a microphone clipped to his clothes. The crew dashed from another part of the graveyard and found him asking, “Why them and not me?”

The scene at Jacksonville City Cemetery is among the more poignant moments in the documentary “Semper Fi: Always Faithful,” about the men, women and children affected over three decades by contaminated water at the nation’s largest Marine base. The film made the short list of 15 documentary features being considered for an Oscar; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will cut the list to five Tuesday.

“Semper Fi” follows Partain and Jerome “Jerry” Ensminger, the men credited with uncovering records showing that the amount of leaked fuel that led to water contamination was many times greater than the Marine Corps acknowledged.

A congressional hearing in 2007 revealed that the camp ignored a directive from the Navy to inspect its water systems for possible contamination and to develop a protocol for the safe disposal of hazardous compounds.

The Marine Corps at Lejeune routinely dumped fluids containing harmful chemicals, which leached into groundwater and eventually contaminated a well. For decades, buried tanks also leaked fuel, allowing the chemical benzene, a known carcinogen, into the ground nearby.

But Camp Lejeune failed to study the health risks of its water after toxic compounds were discovered in the early 1980s, and did not notify Marines and their families. Up to a million people who rotated in and out of the base from the late 1950s to the late 1980s relied on the water to drink and bathe.

The Marine Corps has said it wasn’t aware of the contaminants until the mid-1980s and that contacting the 750,000 to 1 million military personnel and civilians who lived at Camp Lejeune during those decades is too large an undertaking.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry sent a survey last year to about 300,000 people who lived or worked at the Marine base before 1986. The agency expects to release the findings in early 2014.

“We care about every person who has ever lived or worked at Camp Lejeune,” Capt. Kendra Hardesty, a Marine Corps spokeswoman, said last year when the surveys were being sent out. “We are concerned about these individuals and are working hard with the scientific and medical communities to try to find them answers.”

Death of daughter

Ensminger, a square-jawed ex-Marine master sergeant, is still haunted by the death of his 9-year-old daughter, Janey, from cancer in 1985. Partain, who was born at the base in 1968, is one of more than 70 men who lived there and now suffer from rare male breast cancer.

During four years of filming that ended last year, the two men heard mention of a cemetery near Camp Lejeune where hundreds of sick and malformed babies were interred.

“I don’t think any of us believed it existed,” said Rachel Libert, an independent documentary filmmaker who co-directed “Semper Fi” with Tony Hardmon, a veteran cinematographer. Seeing it “was . . . very weird,” she said. “It was a graphic representation of the issue to see all these graves.”

As news of the film’s Oscar worthiness spread, so did interest in Congress. “Suddenly, people on Capitol Hill were requesting DVDs from us, and links to watch it online,” Libert said. “People were taking it more seriously.”

“I thought it was a very powerful presentation of the story,” said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.). He said a friend who lived at the base as a child believes her reproductive problems are tied to the water there, and others have told him they ignored symptoms that turned out to be cancer, not knowing about the water.

“If it were not for a handful of Marine veterans, nobody would know about this thing. The Navy has certainly had to be pulled along very unwillingly to acknowledge that there was a problem with the water,” Miller said.

Miller and Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) reintroduced legislation last year that would provide medical assistance to hundreds of thousands of civilians and military personnel who spent time at the camp. The bill is stalled in the Veterans’ Affairs Committee under Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.).

Similar Senate legislation was introduced by Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). It is awaiting a vote in the upper chamber.

An agency report

Many former residents first learned of the water contamination in 1999, when questionnaires arrived in their mailboxes from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

The agency focused on women such as Partain’s mother, who were pregnant while living on base between 1968 and 1985. In 2003, the agency issued a report showing 103 cases of birth defects or childhood cancers among nearly 12,600 births in the survey — up to five times the normal rate, researchers said.

For the documentary, former residents looked into the camera and said they wondered for years how they got cancer. The film introduced viewers to a healthy looking ex-Marine, Danita Watkins, in 2007 and chronicled her deterioration and death from cancer two years later.

“It was the first time I had someone not survive the making of a film,” Libert said.

Ensminger, who joined the Marines in 1970, started digging into Camp Lejeune’s documents after he saw a news report about the contamination. His ex-wife became pregnant with his daughter, Janey, during a stint at the base. She developed cancer at age 6.

“I see all these memorandums, all this stuff that was going on. I’m thinking to myself, ‘For God’s sake, I was right there,’ ” Ensminger said in a telephone interview.

“I spent a quarter century of my life in the Marine Corps,” he said. “You talk about being disillusioned. I was walking around in a daze. Many times I had to ask myself, ‘Did I throw away 25 years of my life for a lie?’ ”

Partain partnered with Ensminger in 2007. He has found 73 men who lived at the camp and experienced breast cancer, an unusually high number for such a rare illness.

“The bad news is I was conceived, carried and born at Camp Lejeune,” Partain said. “What happened to me in the womb I will carry for the rest of my life, and will more than likely be the end of my life at some point.”

When Ensminger and Partain heard tales of a graveyard section called Baby Heaven two years ago, Partain, whose parents left the camp shortly after his birth, went back.

Baby Heaven isn’t its official name. But local residents called it that, along with Baby Land, as it grew to accommodate more than 700 graves, said Carmen Miracle, the city clerk.

Partain stared at the graves of four babies born between 1967 and 1968, within months of his birth. “We could hear him crying before we found him,” Libert said.

His voiced started to crack again when he talked about the importance of the documentary last week.

“It gives the little guy a voice. Now people can hear what we have to say, not just what the Marine Corps says,” Partain said. “Lies and coverups hate sunshine. Documentaries like this are our way of bringing sunshine to uncover the truth.”

Theatrically Opposed to the Inevitable

the debt charade

By Dana Milbank, Wednesday, January 18,8:07 PM

Lawmakers went home for the holidays and got an earful from constituents about their juvenile behavior in Washington.  So, in their first major act of 2012, House Republicans picked up exactly where they left off: They staged a duplicitous debate in which they pretended that they were going to deny President Obama permission to increase the government’s borrowing limit.

The pretense had been clear since last summer, when 174 House Republicans voted for a budget deal that guaranteed that the debt limit would continue to increase this year unless two-thirds of the House and Senate voted otherwise — a practical impossibility.

But that didn’t stop many of those same 174 Republicans from marching to the floor Wednesday afternoon to vote for a resolution “disapproving” of the very same debt-limit increase they had already blessed. It was a model of deception: claiming to oppose something they had guaranteed would take effect.

“My resolution that is before this chamber will send a message that the constant borrowing from our children, our grandchildren, must come to an end,” declared Rep. Tom Reed (N.Y.), one of the 174 Republicans who voted to allow the borrowing last summer.

“During my time in Congress, I voted nine times against raising the debt limit because it was not tied to spending controls. This is another time to say no,” argued Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Ill.), who said yes last year to the increase he voted against on Wednesday.

“If we do nothing, American prosperity will drown in debt,” said Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (Pa.), another of the 174 Republicans who had authorized the drowning.

“The culture of Washington must be reformed from the ground up,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) thundered in opposition to the debt-limit increase to which he consented last summer. “The future of our nation depends on it.”

Actually, if the culture of Washington is to be reformed, a good place to start would be for Kinzinger and his colleagues to be more honest about their shenanigans.

The role of calling out Republicans for their two-faced behavior fell on Wednesday to one of their own, conservative Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), who, unlike most of his colleagues, was perfectly consistent: He opposed increasing the limit last year, and he continued to oppose it on Wednesday.

“This vote has been called a charade,” Flake said on the floor. “That is true. It is. Let’s face it.”

Flake, one of the few grownups in the chamber, was not done with his fellow Republicans. “I think we have to admit that even if the Senate had passed the House-passed budget, the so-called Ryan budget, we would still have to raise the debt ceiling,” he reminded them. “I don’t think anybody really disputes that. We are going to have to raise the debt ceiling again and again.”

Then Flake did something truly heretical: He reminded Republicans that “we were headed toward this cliff long before the president took control of the wheel.”

What Flake said was demonstrably true: Both parties created the debt mess, and to fix the problem both would have to be honest. Instead of being honest, however, House Republicans were staging a show so that they could tell voters they opposed the very debt limit hike they had authorized.

Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) accused the Republicans of donning “flip-flops.”

“I do prefer Crocs, if anybody cares,” Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) retorted.

Apparently, most of the 174 Republicans who blessed the debt-limit increase last year were embarrassed about going to the floor to argue against it, because most of those who spoke were from that GOP minority who voted against the debt-limit increase last year, too.

“We should never have passed that Budget Control Act the way we did,” said Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who voted no last summer. As a result, he said, Obama is “raising the debt ceiling without us being able to do a thing about it. We made a big mistake.”

Maybe they made a big mistake. Or maybe they did the right thing last year in reaching an agreement that kept the federal government from defaulting.

Reed, the floor leader for Republicans on Wednesday, wanted to have it both ways. “It’s so important, in my opinion, for the future of this nation, the future of the world,” he pleaded, with an urgency that he apparently lacked last summer. “The national debt is a serious threat to our very existence as an American nation.”

Reed and 232 fellow Republicans then voted to “disapprove” of the debt-limit increase — well short of the two-thirds majority needed to overcome a presidential veto. The House’s first legislative act of 2012 had been utterly pointless — which was just the point.

Voting rights are still at risk, Holder warns at S.C. rally

Aggressive enforcement ‘a moral imperative,’ attorney general says

By John Whitesides , Monday, January 16,4:28 PM

COLUMBIA, S.C., — U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., appearing at a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday rally in South Carolina, warned Monday that voting rights laws are still at risk and said aggressive enforcement of those laws is “a moral imperative.”

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. addresses hundreds of people at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event at the South Carolina State House, just weeks after Justice blocked the state’s voter-identification law.

Weeks after his Justice Department blocked a South Carolina voter-identification law it said would make it harder for tens of thousands of voters, mostly minorities, to cast a ballot, Holder said the principle of electoral equality was still endangered.

“The reality is that — in jurisdictions across the country — both overt and subtle forms of discrimination remain all too common,” Holder told hundreds of people attending an annual rally to honor the slain civil rights leader, on the steps of the South Carolina State House.

“Protecting the right to vote, ensuring meaningful access and combating discrimination must be viewed not only as a legal issue, but as a moral imperative,” Holder said. “Ensuring that every eligible citizen has the right to vote must become our common cause.”

The South Carolina law required voters to show a state-issued photo identification card to cast a ballot in an election. Republican supporters said it would prevent voter fraud, but Democratic critics argued that it would make it harder for those without driver’s licenses, many of them poor and black, to cast a ballot.

Justice blocked the law, noting that just over a third of the state’s minorities who are registered voters did not have a driver’s license. The state plans to fight the ruling in court.

South Carolina is one of six Republican-led states that tightened their laws last year to require a photo ID. Two other Republican-led states have similar laws in place, while 23 other states require voters to produce some form of identification.

Under the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, South Carolina is one of 16 largely Southern states that must seek approval from Justice or the federal courts for changes made to state voting laws and boundaries for voting districts.

“This keystone of our voting rights laws is now being challenged as unconstitutional by several jurisdictions,” Holder said, adding there was still work to be done to ensure voter equality.

Holder was invited to the annual rally to honor King by the state chapter of the NAACP.

South Carolina holds its Republican presidential primary on Saturday. The Republican candidates have criticized Justice’s ruling as an example of Washington’s bureaucratic intrusion on state rights under President Obama.

— Reuters

Documentary tells the stories of dark-skinned women

                                                       By Fahima Haque

Actor, producer, writer and director Bill Duke spoke with The RootDC about his new documentary “Dark Girls,” produced along with filmmaker D. Channsin Berry. The film explores the issues that dark-skinned women face. A 10-minute trailer provides haunting insight into the struggles of dark-skinned women.


Women of all ages painfully recount the damage done to their self-esteem and their constant feeling of being devalued and disregarded. One young black man in the trailer said he couldn’t date a woman with dark skin because “they look funny beside me.”

After filming the documentary, Duke said he knew it was a universal message that transcended race. The movie has been shown in cities including Atlanta, Oakland, Toronto and Chicago. The national tour, featuring Duke and Berry, comes to Baltimore on Thursday and Washington on Jan. 20.

Q. Tell us a little about the whys of the project.

A: Skin bleach cream is a multibillion-dollar business worldwide, in Asia, India, Africa and it goes on and on. This nation, too, the irony being that while black women are trying to become less ethnic and more white, white women are risking skin cancer and tanning booths twice a week, Botoxing their lips, getting butt lifts to look more ethnic and crinkling up their hair.

We are not somehow satisfied with who we are as human beings, so therefore we want to be something we’re not. And our position is that God doesn’t make mistakes — how you’re born, how you look, it’s fine. And whoever said that’s not the case, they are saying it to their advantage somehow; so that’s our position.

Q: Is self-esteem more important (than race)?

A: They’re married. I’m not saying they’re not separable, but it’s very, very difficult because you’re told that this particular standard of beauty is what you should be. Many times it’s anorexic, pale, etc. Even the people maintaining it die very quickly. You can’t keep that up, right? But we’re told we have to be that to be beautiful.

We have a 5-year-old child in our film who has four dolls in front of her and her fingers are as dark as mine and we say, what is the beautiful doll: the white doll; what is the smart doll: the white doll. What is the ugly doll: the black doll; what is the stupid doll: the black doll. She’s gotten that message from someplace and that’s what we are addressing. The audience gets the opportunity to really experience it from the lens of our cameras. They decide what the right answer is. We don’t presume that we know.

We’re not healers or ministers. We’re filmmakers, so we present the facts of it. You determine if it’s worth doing anything about.


Q: What drove you to take this idea and turn this project into a reality?

A: From observing the unfortunate pain that friends of mine’s children are still going through. Just yesterday we were at the Links. A beautiful dark-skinned woman was at the desk, and she said to me, “I’m so glad you’re making this film.” I said, “Thank you.” She said: “You don’t understand. A few days ago, my daughter, who’s as dark as me, came home crying that they were calling her ‘blackie’ and all of these names at the playground at her school.” This is not something that happened 50 years ago; this is happening now.


Q: What do you hope to accomplish from this documentary?

A: To create a discussion, because in discussion there’s healing, and in silence there is suffering. Somehow if you can speak it and get it out, healing starts.


Q: What’s been the reaction of audi-ences?

A: It’s been phenomenal; women coming up to us and saying thank you for giving us a voice, thank you for giving our children a voice.


Q: What did you guys learn from doing the film?

A: I think the deepest part is we learned our own prejudices and we learned our own indoctrinations. We learned where our own standards of beauty came from, what were our preferences and why were we making those decisions in terms of women.

You know you think your conscious is right; as you dig deeper in to the core of these issues, it’s a self-discovery process as well. And when you start facing those issues, they are not painless, let’s put it that way. And so this self-discovery process was part of it.

The other thing we learned was how deep some of the injury really goes. I keep repeating these two instances: One is of a young lady who is riding in a car with her mother and a friend and her mother is bragging on her daughter’s beauty, about her cheekbones and her lips and her face and she says in front of the friend, “Can you imagine how beautiful my daughter would be if she had a little more lightness to her skin?” And her mother is not doing this to damage her daughter; this is her belief system, this is what she’s been brought up with and she’s being honest about it.

And the other instance is a woman in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where I come from: We asked her what is the most damaging part of this phenomenon for her, and she states that, well, it’s that simple: “I’ve never ridden in the passenger seat in a man’s car. I’ve had very low self-esteem, and because of the darkness of my skin and being put down all the time, whenever I was with a man, I’d go to his apartment, he’d come to mine or when we’d go out as a date, I’d drive as his assistant or secretary. But I’ve never ridden in the passenger seat of a man’s car.” 

It stopped us for a while; it took two or three minutes to digest that. She now is in the healing process, but she’s in her late 30s/early 40s and it’s taken a lifetime of going through that pain for her now to come to an adjustment that allows her to establish her self worth in a way where she doesn’t allow that any longer. These are the kinds of things we discovered.

In some cases, the prices charged were 10 times higher than the ones posted.

CVS Caremark will refund $5 million to Medicare customers

(FTC says prices touted by RxAmerica plan were misleading )

By Dina ElBoghdady, Thursday, January 12,11:21 PM

CVS Caremark has agreed to pay $5 million to reimburse some CVS and Walgreens customers who were allegedly misled about the prices of certain prescription drugs covered by Medicare, the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.

The FTC alleged that one of CVS Caremark’s Medicare plans — RxAmerica — posted deceptively low prices on the Web sites that consumers use to shop for Medicare prescription drug plans. In some cases, the prices charged were 10 times higher than the ones posted.

As a result, consumers reached the “doughnut hole” sooner than they expected, meaning they had to start paying the full cost of prescriptions out of their own pockets because they had hit the limit on the government’s coverage. The term “doughnut hole” is used because once consumers spend a certain amount on their own, Medicare contributes again to the cost of the drugs.

The FTC charged that the mispriced drugs were bought by RxAmerica beneficiaries at CVS and Walgreens pharmacies from 2007 through at least November 2008. The inaccurate prices were posted on several Web sites, including one run by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which has a tool that enables people to calculate estimated drug-plan costs and figure out which one will help them avoid the doughnut hole for the longest period.

In a statement, CVS Caremark said it “inadvertently” posted inaccurate information for certain generic drugs on the government’s site. Neither the company nor the FTC provided a full listing of the affected drugs, although the FTC cited a few examples.

For instance, RxAmerica posted the price of a generic drug called gabapentin as $26.83. But the actual price of the drug, used to treat epilepsy seizures, was $257.70, the FTC said. The price of megestrol, a generic drug used to treat breast cancer symptoms, was posted at $55.68, but RxAmerica was paying more than five times that amount. Consumers paid their copayments and were probably unaware of the difference.

CVS Caremark said the pricing issues took place before it acquired RxAmerica in October 2008. The timeline provided by the FTC suggests that most, but not all, of the alleged deceptive pricing practices occurred before the acquisition.

The FTC declined to comment on how many consumers may be affected. CVS America describes itself as the nation’s largest manager of pharmacy benefits managers with access to about 65,000 pharmacies, including more than 7,300 CVS pharmacies.

The settlement has yet to be finalized.

But the FTC has closed a two-year, non-public investigation into whether CVS Caremark has engaged in anti-competitive or unfair business practices, the agency said Thursday.

“The commission has determined not to take any additional action at this time,” FTC Secretary Donald S. Clark wrote in a letter earlier this month to CVS Caremark’s attorney. “This action is not to be construed as a determination that a violation may not have occurred. . . . The Commission reserves the right to take such further action as the public interest may require.”

Several labor unions, consumer groups and congressional lawmakers had raised concerns related to the merger of CVS and Caremark in 2007. The critics charged that the combined company switched patients to drugs that were more profitable for CVS Caremark and misused consumer information. They alleged that the company notified CVS pharmacies when their customers patronized other pharmacies.

In a statement Thursday, Douglas A. Sgarro, the company’s chief legal officer, said that the company provided the government with millions of documents and access to many company executives.

“It is important to note that, at the conclusion of this comprehensive investigation, the FTC made no allegations of antitrust law violations or anti-competitive behavior associated with any of our business practices, products or service offerings,” Sgarro said.

I don't know if they're stupid or larcenous, but this is why we need to get rid of them.

As financial crisis brewed, Fed appeared unconcerned

(2006 transcripts could tarnish image of the Bush / Greenspan era )

By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Thursday, January 12,10:04 PM

The leaders of the Federal Reserve went around the room saluting Alan Greenspan during his last day as chairman of the central bank. Then Timothy F. Geithner, the future Treasury secretary, made a prediction.

“I’d like the record to show that I think you’re pretty terrific, too,” Geithner, who was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told Greenspan amid laughter on Jan. 31, 2006. “And thinking in terms of probabilities, I think the risk that we decide in the future that you’re even better than we think is higher than the alternative.”

On Thursday, the Fed released transcripts of its meetings in 2006, offering a new window into what was on the minds of some of the nation’s top economic and financial thinkers just ahead of the financial crisis and subsequent great recession. The transcripts, which are customarily released after five years, show that Fed leaders, armed with the best economic data available, had little idea of what was looming less than two years off.

Trusted to look toward the future and make decisions to keep the economy strong, they spent some of their time patting their leader on the back and even found time to joke about what turned out to be early-warning signs in the markets. While Fed officials — including several who are in key positions today — were aware that the nation’s rapid increase in housing prices was coming to an end, they significantly underestimated how much damage the popping of the real estate bubble would cause in the rest of the economy.

In his first meeting as Fed chairman, in March 2006, Ben S. Bernanke noted the slowdown in the housing market. But he said he shared the view that “strong fundamentals support a relatively soft landing in housing,” adding: “I think we are unlikely to see growth being derailed by the housing market.”

The year began with adulation all around for Greenspan. In that January meeting, Roger Ferguson, then Fed vice chairman and now head of the TIAA-CREF financial services group, called Greenspan a “monetary policy Yoda.”

Janet L. Yellen, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and now the Fed’s vice chair, told Greenspan “that the situation you’re handing off to your successor is a lot like a tennis racket with a gigantic sweet spot.”

In the six years since, Greenspan’s record — seemingly so sterling when he left the central bank after 18 years — has come under substantial criticism from outside economists and analysts. Many say a range of Fed policies under his watch contributed to the financial crisis, including keeping interest rates low for too long, failing to take action to stem the housing bubble and allowing inadequate oversight of financial firms.

A spokesman for Greenspan did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Fed declined to comment. Treasury Department spokesman Anthony Coley said: “Secretary Geithner was an early source of initiative at the Fed to reduce risk and make the financial system more resilient even before 2006.”

Greenspan has acknowledged in recent years that he was “partially” wrong for allowing banks to operate without enough regulation. Bernanke has defended the Fed’s decisions about interest-rate policy and the overall economy but said that “stronger regulation” would have been “more effective” at constraining the housing bubble.

The 2006 transcripts show that Fed officials — like most economists on the outside — considered tremors in the financial markets as not much to worry about. Some were even a source of humor.

In a March meeting, for instance, a Fed economist gave a presentation that expressed modest concerns about Iceland, a small country whose enormous banks were highly indebted.

“We’d like a full report on the Icelandic,” Bernanke said, before he was interrupted by laughter.

Two years later, Iceland’s banks defaulted on their debts, feeding the financial crisis.

Throughout the year, the Fed was slow to realize what was happening in the housing market and the threats it posed, as borrowers who took on risky subprime loans defaulted, causing foreclosures.

There was at least one Cassandra. Former Fed governor Susan Bies warned that banks had built their models for “falling interest rates and rising housing prices.”

“It is not clear what may happen when either of those trends turns around,” she said.

Bernanke responded later: “So far we are seeing, at worst, an orderly decline in the housing market; but there is still, I think, a lot to be seen as to whether the housing market will decline slowly or more quickly.”

In June 2006, the Fed still wasn’t totally aware of what was happening in the market. A Fed economist reported that “we have not seen — and don’t expect — a broad deterioration in mortgage credit quality.” That turned out to be an incorrect description of what was actually occurring.

By August 2006, there was an increasing awareness that problems in housing — with prices starting to decline more rapidly — could lead to problems in the rest of the economy. Said Yellen: “The housing slowdown could become an unwelcome housing slump.”

Bernanke acknowledged that there might be some “spillover effect” from housing into the rest of the economy.

But others had their attention elsewhere. Geithner was identifying the threat of inflation as the main challenge for the Fed.

At the end of the year, officials were still optimistic.

“The current weakness in the economy still seems principally to stem from the direct effects of the slowdown in housing on construction activity” and other factors, Geithner said in December 2006. “The softer-than-expected recent numbers don’t argue, in our view, for a substantial reassessment of the risks in the outlook.”

DES and Breast Cancer

Jackie White, 48, of Centerburg, Ohio, says she knew she was a so-called "DES daughter" since her the early teens.

White says her mother told her she took DES while pregnant. The synthetic estrogen was intended at the time to prevent birth complications and miscarriage. But a decade after White was born, researchers found the hormone broke through the uterine barrier and left many children whose mothers took the hormone at risk for reproductive complications.

Since then, she says she was hypervigilant when it came to her reproductive health and received routine mammograms and gynecological exams. But it wasn't White's lower reproductive health that she had to worry about. In 2010, White was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer.

"I knew the risks of being a DES daughter, I did everything they told you to do, I had good doctors, I was faithful about my screening and knew my risk," said White. "But I was nowhere close prepared for breast cancer."

White is now one of 53 women suing 14 major DES drug manufacturers in a first ever lawsuit alleging a link between DES and breast cancer.

A study released October 2011 in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that DES daughters over age 40 have twice the risk of getting breast cancer, which plaintiff lawyers suggest support their case. According to public records and court testimony, experts brought forth by the pharmaceutical companies deny any link between DES and breast cancer.

The lawsuit plaintiffs also allege that drug manufacturing companies like Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Co. withheld information about the DES hams RISKS from physicians.

A spokesman for Eli Lilly pointed ABC News to a financial disclosure form which stated, "We believe these claims are without merit and are prepared to defend against them vigorously."

Eli Lilly declined to comment further. Bristol-Myers Squibb, Co. declined to comment.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 5 to 10 million people were exposed to DES between 1938 and 1971, including mothers, sons, daughters, and grandchildren.

In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advised physicians against prescribing DES to pregnant women because it was linked to a rare vaginal cancer in some daughters.

More than 30 years worth of research now suggests that both men and women born to mothers who took DES during pregnancy may be at higher risk of developing reproductive complications including cysts, cancer, and infertility, according to the CDC.

White said she didn't recognize the purported link at first because she had no family history of breast cancer.

"I never thought to tell [my breast surgeon] I was a DES daughter," she said.

Now, even though she's in remission, White says the effort she's put in for her own health is not enough. She's on a mission to help others.

"My intent is to get responsibility for awareness out there," said White. "I hope that the judge rules that there's valid science here."

N.C. to Compensate Victims of Sterilization

in 20th Century Eugenics Program

North Carolina will become the first state to compensate victims of a mass sterilization program that targeted poor minorities in a 20th century eugenics program, offering a $50,000 a person.

In a vote today, the Eugenics Compensation Task Force recommended the lump-sum amount, putting a three-year statute of limitations on claiming those funds.

The task force also established a pool to fund mental health services for sterilization victims.

The state has located 72 such victims, according to Jill Lucas, communications director for the North Carolina Department of Administration.

A final report on today's recommendations will be given to Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue to consider. She will pass along her recommendations to the Generally Assembly, which will make a final decision about compensation.

Some lawmakers had urged as much as $1 million for each victim.

"The state recognizes that a wrong has been done and while these actions can never be reversed, the governor has made it a priority to reach out and help identify and compensate victims for their experience," said Lucas.

The state sterilized more than 7,600 people in North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 -- one of many other states in misguided attempts to weed out criminals and the mentally disabled.

"If we all agree that there is no amount that restores somebody's loss of ability to procreate, then it's understood that the ultimate figure is an attempt to put out an active apology instead of a verbal apology," task force member Demetrius Worley Berry, a Greensboro attorney, told the Associated Press "This is not an attempt to compensate, repair or restore what happened years ago."

Last year, ABCNews.com interviewed Elaine Riddick, a poor, victim of child molestation who was robbed of her ability to have children.

Pregnant by rape, young Riddick went into a North Carolina hospital in 1968 to give birth to her son. Years later, she learned she was sterilized.

The decision was made by the North Carolina Eugenics Board, a five-person state committee responsible for ordering the sterilization of thousands of individuals in the name of social welfare.

Deemed "promiscuous" and "feebleminded" by a social worker at the hospital, Riddick, who came from a black family on welfare, was recommended to the state for sterilization shortly after arriving. Riddick's illiterate grandmother, was told that they were doing a "procedure" that was necessary to help the young girl and signed the sterilization papers with an "X". The state authorized and paid for the procedure, and without her consent or even her knowledge, Riddick was sterilized shortly after giving birth. She was 14 years old.

"They didn't have permission from me because I was too young and my grandmother didn't understand what was going on," Riddick, now 57, said. "They said I was feebleminded, they said I would never be able to do anything for myself. I was a little bitty kid and they cut me open like a hog."

"I was raped twice," she says, "once by the perpetrator and once by the state of North Carolina."

At some point in the century, more than half of the states in the U.S. had similar programs that allowed for the sterilization of those the government deemed unfit to procreate.

When most programs began in the early 1930s, this usually meant those in institutions for mental illness or mental retardation, but over the decades criminals, the blind, the deaf, the disabled, alcoholics, those with epilepsy and ultimately the rural poor on welfare would fall under the umbrella of "unfit to procreate."

In all, 65,000 Americans were sterilized before the last program was shut down in the early 1980s.

Though detailed, often meticulous records of these sterilizations survive in state archives, America's flirtation with selective sterilization has for the most part been a buried chapter in the nation's history.

"Eugenics in the U.S. is something that's still not nationally known. People associate it with Nazis; they don't realize that the U.S. did it too," says Rebecca Kluchin, an assistant professor of History at California State University, Sacramento who specializes in the U.S. eugenics programs.

Only seven of the 33 states who ran such programs have even publicly acknowledged or apologized to victims of sterilization.

Only North Carolina, home to the third most prolific sterilization program in the nation, has recently made moves to compensate its victims.

In 2010, Perdue established the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, whose mission is to determine proper compensation for those still suffering from the state's mistakes. Fewer than 2,000 sterilization victims are estimated to still be alive today.

North Carolina sterilization program was at its peak during the civil unrest and exploding welfare costs of the 1960s, says Johanna Schoen, an associate professor of history at University of Iowa and expert in the North Carolina sterilization program.

It was the only state where social workers had the right to suggest "clients" for sterilization and the eugenics board seldom turned down those recommended -- they had a 95 percent acceptance rate. What's more, the program created a climate where doctors felt entitled to take sterilization into their own hands, doling them out when they saw fit, she says.

Instead of sterilizations taking place in mental institutions, in a few southern states they became more common in rural hospitals where poor unmarried women would be sterilized without their knowledge after coming in to give birth. In North Carolina, 85 percent of sterilization were performed on women as young as 9-years-old.

The N.C.Sterilization Victims Foundation can be reached by their toll-free hotline, 1-877-550-6013, or on their website: www.sterilizationvictims.nc.gov.

Blogger's Note:  As alluded to in this article, most Americans associate eugenics with Nazi Germany.  Not only did the United States use eugenics to supress minority populations, the United States did it first.  I urge you to read the Wikipedia article.   Eugenics in America

In Moderation

 

CHICAGO (AP) — Smoking a joint once a week or a bit more apparently doesn't harm the lungs, suggests a 20-year study that bolsters evidence that marijuana doesn't do the kind of damage tobacco does.

The results, from one of the largest and longest studies on the health effects of marijuana, are hazier for heavy users — those who smoke two or more joints daily for several years. The data suggest that using marijuana that often might cause a decline in lung function, but there weren't enough heavy users among the 5,000 young adults in the study to draw firm conclusions.

Still, the authors recommended "caution and moderation when marijuana use is considered."

Marijuana is an illegal drug under federal law although some states allow its use for medical purposes.

The study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham was released Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The findings echo results in some smaller studies that showed while marijuana contains some of the same toxic chemicals as tobacco, it does not carry the same risks for lung disease.

It's not clear why that is so, but it's possible that the main active ingredient in marijuana, a chemical known as THC, makes the difference. THC causes the "high" that users feel. It also helps fight inflammation and may counteract the effects of more irritating chemicals in the drug, said Dr. Donald Tashkin, a marijuana researcher and an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tashkin was not involved in the new study.

Study co-author Dr. Stefan Kertesz said there are other aspects of marijuana that may help explain the results.

Unlike cigarette smokers, marijuana users tend to breathe in deeply when they inhale a joint, which some researchers think might strengthen lung tissue. But the common lung function tests used in the study require the same kind of deep breathing that marijuana smokers are used to, so their good test results might partly reflect lots of practice, said Kertesz, a drug abuse researcher and preventive medicine specialist at the Alabama university.

The study authors analyzed data from participants in a 20-year federally funded health study in young adults that began in 1985. Their analysis was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The study randomly enrolled 5,115 men and women aged 18 through 30 in four cities: Birmingham, Chicago, Oakland, Calif., and Minneapolis. Roughly equal numbers of blacks and whites took part, but no other minorities. Participants were periodically asked about recent marijuana or cigarette use and had several lung function tests during the study.

Overall, about 37 percent reported at least occasional marijuana use, and most users also reported having smoked cigarettes; 17 percent of participants said they'd smoked cigarettes but not marijuana. Those results are similar to national estimates.

On average, cigarette users smoked about 9 cigarettes daily, while average marijuana use was only a joint or two a few times a month — typical for U.S. marijuana users, Kertesz said.

The authors calculated the effects of tobacco and marijuana separately, both in people who used only one or the other, and in people who used both. They also considered other factors that could influence lung function, including air pollution in cities studied.

The analyses showed pot didn't appear to harm lung function, but cigarettes did. Cigarette smokers' test scores worsened steadily during the study. Smoking marijuana as often as one joint daily for seven years, or one joint weekly for 20 years was not linked with worse scores. Very few study participants smoked more often than that.

Like cigarette smokers, marijuana users can develop throat irritation and coughs, but the study didn't focus on those. It also didn't examine lung cancer, but other studies haven't found any definitive link between marijuana use and cancer.