Man it sucks to be you.  Hey come on down to Tampa FL the air quality is
great. No better yet you should stay where your at. Keep up the good fight.
LOL

Hey mcs, hang in there, keep blaming everything bad on bush, that will
really help a whole hell of a lot. After all you wouldn't want to take
any responsibility for anyrhing yourself.

You might as well toss all other governments into that hat too.
Not to be too cynical, but nobody ever said that life was going to be
easy or fair.  If you don't like your environment, why not move to
another one more conducive to your good health?  It is possible.  In
fact, it is impossible to stop you, if that is what you truly want.
In my limited experience, I have found it is easier to change my own
living situation/environment than it is to change everybody else's
around me.  It's sort of like sweeping the beach; an exercise in
futility.  Unless you like the fight.  Then that's what you are really
about and continuing to rant will simply fuel your hatred.

Desiring an eye for an eye may turn you into one of those
power/control hungry personages you seem to dislike so much.

Sounds like you hate everything with a passion.  I think if
everything you complain about were ever resolved, you'd be
absolutely miserable.

A middle aged man lived in the downwind silhouette approximately 1
kilometer from an oil refinery.
Twentyfive years ago I inspected his situation which was at the time as
a moderate asthmatic, being able to still work doing light duties.
(Carpark gate attendant, another petroleum fume environment)
On some occasions the oil refinery fumes were quite strong and
blanketed his area this was undoubtedly the root-cause of his problem.
I suggested he move away before he became a complete liability for his
family.
His argument was "why should he move, he wasn't causing the problem"!
Good point, I left!!
Some ten years later I revisited that area and was surprised to see he
still resided there, his condition had deteriorated significantly, and
he was completely housebound. (One really unhappy chappie!!)
I again suggested he get the hell out of that place but his argument
was now that he could no longer afford to move let alone even consider
it, anyway the refinery pollution had significantly reduced.
Some years later I was advised the fellow had contracted some form of
cancer and passed away.
On consideration this was probably a blessing in disguise for that
chap, because his quality of life in later years was spent sucking on a
machine most of the time and being attended by a travelling nurse with
charity workers assisting him at other times, his close family
(parents) had passed on, they had originally owned the house which had
passed to him but been mortgaged to financially assist his medical
circumstances, I don't believe he reached 50 years.
I have seen similar kinds of circumstances happen with others from time
to time and anyone interested in enquiring into these kinds of things
will uncover the problem as being quite common, even though the reason
for death on their death certificates is rarely mentioned as being
related to asthma.

There is no mileage in existing or accepting living in a circumstance
where you are being affected by your surrounding conditions, asthma in
itself is an insidious condition that erodes and saps the will to make
change, it takes strength to overcome this situation. Cut your losses
and get the hell out of it!!
Do not place material things in front of your chance for well-being,
and blame no-one but yourself for your circumstance.
In other words get off your arse and help yourself, instead of whinging
that someone else is causing your problem!
Cheers, Merlin.

I hate Bush because I love America.

Roger

air pollution and asthma connection is not about maybe, its definite.The
only thing that many people with asthma don't  realize is how much this
affects their  propensity to have worse symptoms.  The reason the epa has
these ratings in case someone thinks this is just my subjective reaction to
Bush or not liking my city , is because the quality of the air might affect
peoples ability to cope in certain conditions and having this rating scheme
might alert people about the possibilities of changing their behavior or
patterns to adjust to those conditions. Its sad, that even with my ranting,
lots of people in asthma doctors offices ,  dont' have internet access and
don't get the air ratings numbers and so they believe its something they did
or its something inheriently wrong with themselves.  The degree in which our
air induces damage to our being ultimately is partly because of a government
that don't give a sh.. about you or me.  We are being litereally poisoned
and if I am to be blamed its because I don't want to live in poverty to
escape this poisoning . The government has a responsibility to protect is
citizens or should have but when I am paying more then anything in my life
to energy companies and then have to pay for my asthma on top of it, it
shouldn't be any wonder why all this is happening. My job is to keep telling
people not to decide to live in Ne cities or to get these poison masters out
of office or at the very least to get people to see the connections to our
air and health. I am that certain of its consequences.

But your choice is not between poverty and pollution. Stop making
excuses and accept what part of this is your own fault. Not all of it
is yours but it is not all Bush's either.

Anyway, you should love this. ANyone who thinks Bush is doing what is
best should read this explain how kid's smoking is a good thing.

The Justice Department's Case against the Tobacco Companies

Michael C. Fiore, M.D., M.P.H., Paula A. Keller, M.P.H., and Timothy B.
Baker, Ph.D.

The case brought by the Department of Justice against the tobacco
industry - the largest civil litigation in U.S. history - has
become mired in controversy. Projections suggest that about 23 million
Americans, or one of every two current smokers, will die prematurely
because of a disease caused by tobacco use. The lawsuit called for
actions to remedy harms that have resulted directly from misconduct on
the part of the tobacco industry. Unfortunately, Justice Department
attorneys shifted gears at the 11th hour, drastically reducing the
remedies proposed by their own expert witness, and reports surfaced
that government witnesses were pressured to water down their testimony.
The reasons for this behavior remain murky, but the likely long-term
effects seem clear: more latitude for the tobacco companies, more new
smokers, and more smoking-related illness and death.

The origins of the case can be traced back to 1999, when in the wake of
the Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 (which did not earmark monies
for tobacco control), President Bill Clinton announced in his State of
the Union address that the Justice Department would begin litigation
against the tobacco companies. The initial filing in late 1999 was
based on efforts to recover Medicare funds expended as a result of
tobacco-caused illness and on the civil federal Racketeer Influenced
and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which provides a mechanism for
preventing and restraining unlawful racketeering activity.

After five years of preparation, the trial began in September 2004 and
was divided into two parts - a liability phase and a remedies phase.
Rulings regarding both phases are expected in late 2005. In the
liability phase, the Justice Department focused on what it called the
"seven pillars of fraud" in portraying tobacco-industry misconduct (see
list). In response, the tobacco companies argued that, even if they had
engaged in improper behavior in the past, they had ceased to do so
after the Master Settlement Agreement and had become law-abiding
corporate citizens.

The proposed penalties presented by the Justice Department during the
remedies phase of the trial were constrained by two prior court
rulings. In 2000, presiding U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler
ruled that penalties in the case could not be used to offset Medicare
costs. Then, in February 2005, with the trial in its fifth month, an
appellate court decided that a $280 billion disgorgement remedy was not
"forward looking" and would not fulfill its ruling that RICO remedies
must "prevent and restrain" future wrongful conduct (a decision that
the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court on July 18). The
Justice Department responded by developing a new series of penalties,
designed to limit future misconduct by the tobacco industry and to
augment national tobacco-control efforts.

Beginning on May 2, 2005, witnesses for the Justice Department proposed
future-focused remedies that included the continued disclosure of
internal industry documents, prohibitions against marketing targeted at
young people, the elimination of certain brand descriptors (such as
"light") on cigarette packs, and the dismissal of the senior managers
of tobacco companies.

One key remedy proposed as part of this new strategy was to provide
evidence-based cessation treatment to all smokers who want to quit.
This plan was based on components of the National Action Plan for
Tobacco Cessation1 that had been prepared in 2003, at the request of
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, by a panel of
tobacco-control and public health experts: the Subcommittee on
Cessation of the U.S. Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health. The
proposed four-part cessation remedy (the remedy was designed by Dr.
Fiore, who was chair of the subcommittee and also served as an expert
witness in the trial) included money for a barrier-free, comprehensive
telephone "quit line" that would provide counseling and medication to
the 10 percent of smokers projected to use it each year; a paid media
campaign; smoking-cessation research; and clinical training. It was
estimated that, to achieve its goals, this program would require $5.2
billion per year for 25 years (a total of $130 billion). Analysis
presented at trial suggested that this evidence-based plan would
ultimately reduce the number of smokers in the United States by almost
33 million (see graph).

The model is based on data from the U.S. Census and the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and assumes that there are currently
about 47 million adult smokers, 33 million (70 percent) of whom report
that they want to quit and are the targets of the proposed national
cessation program. It is also assumed that approximately 3.7 percent of
current smokers will continue to quit on their own each year, that
approximately 1 million additional smokers will quit as a result of the
national cessation program each year (as projected by the National
Action Plan for Tobacco Cessation), that approximately 200,000 current
smokers will die each year, and that approximately 734,000 persons will
begin using tobacco each year but that 70 percent of them will later
want to quit. This model has been adapted from U.S. Justice Department
exhibit 18266.

The tobacco industry never questioned the scientific basis of the
treatment program nor its projected efficacy. It did, however, question
whether the treatment could reach the projected number of smokers,
although the projections were based on actual rates of use of such
treatment in the population and on expert testimony presented to the
Subcommittee on Cessation.

During closing arguments in early June 2005, attorneys for the Justice
Department stunned observers by reducing dramatically the amount they
were requesting for a cessation remedy - to only $10 billion over a
five-year period. In an effort to explain this move, senior Justice
Department attorney Frank Marine stated in a letter to the Washington
Post that the original $130 billion settlement was not sufficiently
focused on future violations of the law and therefore was not in
compliance with the requirement that remedies be forward-looking.2

This explanation was puzzling. The issue of whether the remedy was
forward-looking was an old one for the Justice Department. In fact, on
May 12, 2005, the department had filed a brief arguing that the $130
billion smoking-cessation program was indeed forward-looking and would
prevent and restrain future wrongful conduct by the tobacco industry.
It was unclear why they were suddenly backing down.

This retrenchment ignited a firestorm of controversy and produced
additional evidence suggesting that the department was not pursuing a
forceful prosecution of the case. Numerous press reports have indicated
that political appointees in the Bush Justice Department may have
ordered a reduction of the cessation remedy, over the strenuous
objections of the career tobacco-team attorneys.3 According to a June
16, 2005, report in the New York Times, the team's lead attorneys,
Sharon Eubanks and Stephen Brody, had warned, in an internal memo to
Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum, Jr., that "we do not want
politics to be perceived as the underlying motivation, and that is
certainly a risk if we make adjustments in our remedies presentation
that are not based on evidence." Even presiding Judge Kessler raised
questions, stating, "Perhaps it suggests that additional influences
have been brought to bear on what the government's case is."4 Moreover,
three of the government's expert witnesses (Mr. Matthew Myers, Dr.
Michael Eriksen, and Dr. Max Bazerman) were reportedly asked by Justice
Department attorneys to soften their testimony (Myers, for example, was
asked to change his recommendation for banning marketing to young
people).

In response to the resultant protests, including some from members of
Congress - such as Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.),
Representative Marty Meehan (D-Mass.), Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa),
Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.),
Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) -
the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility launched
an investigation.5 Furthermore, six leading public health organizations
(the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the
American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, the
National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, and the
Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund) requested and were granted by Judge
Kessler the ability to intervene as parties in the case, arguing that
the government's proposed remedies no longer addressed the defendants'
wrongful conduct.

These surprising actions raise concern about the current
administration's commitment to a faithful pursuit of remedies and to
saving or improving the lives of Americans who are addicted to tobacco.
If there is a valid reason for the abandonment of the $130 billion
smoking-cessation remedy, the Justice Department has failed to
articulate it in a convincing manner. As a result, attention has
focused on political influence within the department rather than on the
compelling portrayal of tobacco-industry crimes presented by the
tobacco-team attorneys. There is still some hope that Judge Kessler
could impose a larger cessation remedy than the $10 billion requested
or that the Supreme Court could reinstate the $280 billion disgorgement
remedy. As we await these decisions, however, children continue to take
up smoking, millions of people continue to die prematurely, tobacco
companies continue to reap huge profits, and relatively little money is
being used to help smokers quit.

Source Information

Dr. Fiore is the director, Ms. Keller the senior policy adviser, and
Dr. Baker the associate director of the Center for Tobacco Research and
Intervention at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison.

References

Fiore MC, Croyle RT, Curry SJ, et al. Preventing 3 million premature
deaths and helping 5 million smokers quit: a national action plan for
tobacco cessation. Am J Public Health 2004;94:205-210. [Abstract/Full
Text]
Behind the Justice Department's shift on tobacco. Washington Post. June
15, 2005:A24.
Lichtblau E. Lawyers fought U.S. move to curb tobacco penalty. New York
Times. June 16, 2005:A1.
Judge queries U.S. decision to slash penalty for tobacco firms. New
York Times. June 8, 2005.
Waxman HA, Meehan MT. Letter from members of Congress calling on
Justice Department to investigate whether government witness was
pressured to weaken testimony. June 20, 2005. (Accessed August 3, 2005,
at
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/reports/doj/letters/jarrett062005.pdf.)

Another crack baby has grown up.

1) Another Bush basher venting......
2) If you tried inhale once in a while , rather than venting rage .. you
might be better off....
3) If you would channel you 'passion' into action for yourself, you could
see great things happen...
3) Remember to watch for the black helicopters coming up over the
horizon....

In the future when venting your politics, leave this group out of your
'cross-posting' or you leave yourself open to replies such as this!

"I hope one day he experiences what I experience and then tells the person
who is giving him discomfort  to make it easier and do it more often ."

Are you saying your boyfriend doesn't lube up with KY Jelly before he
buttfucks you? But that if he *would* lube up then you'd like for him to
buttfuck you more often?

Is that what you're saying?

GIT-R-DONE
Krusty