We're furious.

In a backroom deal brokered to get the votes necessary to pass the House health care bill, one amendment was allowed an up-or-down vote on the floor. That amendment, the Stupak amendment - which passed on a vote of 240 to 194 - is the most serious assault on abortion rights in a generation.

What's more, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, 20 of the 64 Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the measure are nominally pro-choice.

Why did pro-choice Democrats vote to approve the Stupak amendment? We're telling these 20 Democrats - all men - to reconsider their vote and urge Congressional leadership to do everything they can to ensure the health care bill that comes out of committee does not take us back to an era of coat hangers and back alley abortions.

GO HERE >  https://act.credoaction.com/campaign/send_a_coathanger/index.html?r=5020

By Pat Shannan

In late August, Desiree Jennings was a beautiful and athletic 26-year-old Washington Redskins cheerleader anxious for the upcoming Sunday excitement, but by the time the new season began in September, she was a crippled and hopeless spastic who could speak only with great difficulty and one syllable at a time. She had taken a seasonal flu shot and experienced what doctors called a “one-in-a-million” adverse neurological reaction and was left with an “incurable” affliction known as dystonia.

Dystonia can affect just one muscle, a group of muscles or all of the muscles. Symptoms can include tremors and voice problems or a dragging foot. Researchers think that a problem in the part of the brain that handles messages about muscle contractions might cause dystonia. There is no cure, they say.

Video reports were not only heart-rending but so weird as to cause many people to believe the young woman was faking because of the ambulatory antics caused by the disease. Medical reports had already confirmed that this was no fake.

These films showed the pathetically crippled Jennings able to run forward normally and even walk backwards unimpaired, but whenever she slowed to a walking pace or attempted to walk forward, the bizarre symptoms immediately returned. She could also talk normally while running or walking backwards but could utter only single syllables while still.

Dear friends,

We already knew that a majority of Americans support the inclusion of a public health insurance option in the final health care reform bill.

But now that the results of our online poll are in, something else is now clear: the American people who voted for change last November will settle for nothing less than a robust public option.

Over 80,000 people have responded to our poll, proving Americans know the difference between a strong public option and a weak one -- and a weak one just won't do.

Between October 28, 2009 and November 13, 2009 we asked Americans to rank their support for various forms of the "public option" currently under consideration by Congress for inclusion in the final health care reform bill. We've always known that a majority of Americans support the public option, and the 83,954 respondents who participated in our poll reflect the fact that Americans want the strongest possible public option that can pass the Congress:

• Four out of five survey respondents voiced full support for a "50 state public option."
  
  
• A majority of respondents voiced moderate to high support for a public option that includes a state "opt-out" provision.
  
  
• Roughly three out of four survey respondents voiced little or no support for a public option bill that requires states to "opt-in" before they can participate, and
  
  
• Only 12% of respondents voiced moderate to full support for a so-called "trigger," with 65% completely opposed to such a compromise.

I hope you will take a moment to review these results in greater depth below, as I share our findings with my colleagues in the Senate to encourage the inclusion of a robust public option in the final health care reform bill.

GO HERE FOR DETAILS:  http://ga3.org/dickdurbin/po_poll_results.html?member_key=es885639zj3i8wjk&

It's official: There's water on the moon.

NASA's LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced Friday.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount," Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

Scientists have long suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to sustain water frozen at the surface. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India's now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 for extended missions on the lunar surface. Finding usable amounts of ice on the moon would be a boon for that effort since it could be a vital local resource to support a lunar base.

The impact was observed by LCROSS's sister spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other space and ground-based telescopes.

The debris plume from the impacts was not seen right away and was only revealed a week after the impact, when mission scientists had had time to comb through the probe's data.

NASA launched LCROSS — short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — and LRO in June.

NASA A visible camera image shows the plume of debris rising from the LCROSS impact about 20 seconds after it hit. The inset image shows more detail.

MORE HERE >  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33912611/ns/technology_and_science-space/

House Passes Landmark Healthcare Bill with Amendment Backed by Anti-Abortion Lawmakers

AMY GOODMAN: The House of Representatives voted late Saturday night in favor of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, a bill that would expand healthcare coverage and bar insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions. On Sunday, President Obama called the 220-to-215 vote courageous and historic and urged the Senate to follow suit. :

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Given the heated and often misleading rhetoric surrounding this legislation, I know that this was a courageous vote for many members of Congress, and I’m grateful to them and for the rest of their colleagues for taking us this far.

AMY GOODMAN: The bill has been described as the biggest overhaul of the country’s healthcare system since the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965. House Democrats burst into applause as the crucial 218th vote was cast in favor of the bill. Two hundred nineteen Democrats and one Republican, Louisiana’s Joseph Cao, voted for the bill. The no votes included thirty-nine Democrats and 176 Republicans. Among those who voted no was Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich, a leading proponent of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all healthcare system.

Reproductive rights took a hit Saturday night when the House also passed an amendment to establish limits on the funding of abortions within the new framework that would be established by the Affordable Health Care for America Act. Speaking at a news conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she allowed the amendment to go to a vote as a way to seek, quote, “common ground.”

SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: We have sought, in the course of the development of this bill, common ground in many areas, this being one of those. We did not reach the common ground yet that we hope to achieve; therefore, we had an amendment on the floor. We will continue to seek common ground.

MORE TRANSCRIPTS HERE >  http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/9/house_passes_healthcare_bill_with_amendment

Widespread rumors of Ukraine bioterrorism

Yulia Tymoshenko, prime minister of Ukraine and a candidate in upcoming national elections, visits a children's hospital in western Ukraine.

Ukrainian organizations in Canada have today issued an urgent appeal to the Canadian public and government for assistance in combatting the serious explosion of severe acute respiratory illness that has struck Ukraine in the past week and now affects over 900,000 people, with some 40,000 people now hospitalized. (http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/November2009/08/c7130.html)

This is not H1N1 2009 pandemic swine flu, also called California flu in Ukraine. People everywhere continue to refer to it as H1N1, but according to both WHO and the Ukraine government they are different diseases. The Ukraine government still reports only a handful of deaths from H1N1 California (”swine”) flu, with just one lab-confirmed death. Meanwhile both the government and WHO have been tracking the exponential increased of illnesses from severe acute respiratory illness, which have symptoms very different from H1N1 flu.

It is expected that within the next day or so WHO will release the gene sequence from tissue samples. Meanwhile speculation is rampant about what the ‘mystery disease’ actually is. Opinions range from a mutated, recombined, or man-made H1N1 to weaponized pneumonic plague or bird flu. At this stage there is no publicly available information on the cause. However, many observers say that it cannot possibly be H1N1 unless it is a different and much more virulent strain of it.

MUCH MORE HERE >  http://columbiavalleynews.com/news/2009/11/08/widespread-rumors-of-ukraine-bioterrorism/

By Dr. Russell Blaylock (www.russellblaylockmd.com)

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.” G.W.F. Hegel

I have been following the evolving “pandemic” of H1N1 influenza beginning with the original discovery of the infection in Mexico in March of this year. In the course of this study I have tried to utilize as my sources high-quality, peer-reviewed journals, data from the CDC and accepted textbooks of virology.

As with all such studies one has to integrate and correlate previous experiences with epidemics and pandemics. As you will see, a great deal of my material comes from official sources, such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the New England Journal of Medicine. Thus my distracters cannot claim that I am using material that is not within the mainstream.

Pregnant Women NOT at Special Risk from Swine Flu

In the beginning, even before it was declared a level 6 pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), a group of “scientists” were sounding the alarm that this might indeed be the terrifying, deadly pandemic they had been expecting for over half a century.

Naturally, the vaccine manufacturers were doing all they could to fuel this fear and they were quietly making deals with WHO to be among the companies selected to manufacture the “pandemic” vaccine for the world. Being anointed by WHO would guarantee tens of billions in profits.

As the infection began to spread into the United States and then the rest of the world, its peculiar nature became obvious. Those born before 1950 seem to have a high degree of resistance to the infection and the disease seems slightly more pathogenic (disease causing) among those aged 25 to 49. Early on the official sources declared that pregnant women were at a special risk as compared to the seasonal flu.¹ As we shall see later, this was a grand lie.

Initial Studies Show H1N1 NOT Dangerous or Highly Contagious

Once the pandemic had been declared, virologists tested the potency of this virus using a conventional method, that is, infecting ferrets with the virus.² What they found was that the H1N1 virus was no more pathogenic than the ordinary seasonal flu, even though it did penetrate slightly deeper into the lungs. It in no way matched the pathogenecity of the 1917-1918 H1N1 virus. It also did not infect other tissues, and especially important, it did not infect the brain.

Next, they wanted to test the ability of the virus to spread among the population. The results of their tests were conflicting, but the best evidence indicated that the virus did not spread to others very well. In fact, an unpublished study by the CDC found that when one member of a family contracted the H1N1 virus, other members of the family were infected only 10% of the time -- a very low communicability.

This was later confirmed in a study of the experience of New York State, in which only 6.9% of the population contracted the virus, far below the 50% predicted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.³ It is instructive to note that during the 1917-18 Swine flu epidemic the world infection rate was only 20%.⁴

They also predicted that 1.8 million people would need hospitalization and 300,000 would end up in the intensive care units (ICU). Further, they predicted that hospitals would be overwhelmed and that ICU units would not have enough beds to care for the sick and dying. Incredibly, they predicted that 90,000 people would die.

 

Pediatric Flu Deaths by Year Made WORSE by Flu Vaccine

• 1999 -- - 29 deaths
• 2000 -- - 19 deaths
• 2001 -- - 13 deaths
• 2002 -- - 12 deaths
• 2003 -- - 90 deaths (Year of mass vaccinations of children under age 5 years)
• 2006 -- 78 deaths
• 2007 -- - 88 deaths
• 2008 – 116 deaths (40.9% vaccinated at age 6 months to 23 months)¹¹

Parents should also keep in mind that this study, as well as the Australian/New Zealand Study found that childhood obesity played a major role in a child’s risk of being admitted to the ICU or dying. This is another dramatic demonstration as to the danger of obesity in children and that all parents should avoid MSG (all food-based excitotoxin additives), excess sugar and excess high glycemic carbohydrates in their children’s diets. This goes for pregnant moms as well.

Much Fear Mongering

MUCH MORE HERE: >  http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/11/03/What-We-Have-Learned-About-the-Great-Swine-Flu-Pandemic.aspx

MORE > http://www.russellblaylockmd.com/