XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World: 05/17/11

Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Ronald McDonald is facing a midlife crisis - some call him 'creepy' - health advocates say he pushes junk food on kids -

Ronald McDonald is having a midlife crisis.
His floppy shoes, painted-on smile and flaming-red hair may be a harder sell to today's kids who are trading in their dolls and trucks for manicures and mobile game apps at ever younger ages. He also seems out of step with McDonald's Corp.'s new efforts to appeal to adults. The 48-year-old spokesclown has fallen flat in new ads this year, according to Ace Metrix, a group that tracks TV advertising.
And the government is getting strict on marketing unhealthy food to children. That has both marginalized Ronald as more of a mascot than a product pitchman and landed him in the middle of the bigger debate about food makers' responsibilities in stemming the rise in childhood obesity.

McDonald's says it is proud of the food it offers and that Ronald teaches children to be active.
Critics say it's time to hang up the yellow jumper.
A group called Corporate Accountability International plans to ask Ronald to retire at the company's annual meeting on Thursday. They say Ronald encourages kids to eat junk food, contributing to a rise in childhood obesity and related diseases such as diabetes.
The group, which campaigned against the Joe Camel cigarette mascot in the '90s and complained about Ronald as a role model at McDonald's annual meeting last year, has stepped up its campaign. The group has taken out full-page ads Wednesday in the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Metro and four other papers to call for his head. The ads, signed by more than 550 health groups and professionals, carry the headline, "Doctors' Orders: Stop Marketing Junk Food To Kids."
What follows is an open letter to McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner, that says in part, "We ask that you heed our concern and retire your marketing promotions for food high in salt, fat, sugar, and calories to children, whatever form they take — from Ronald McDonald to toy giveaways."

Read more - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43068405/ns/business-retail/?gt1=43001

Gingrich touts fiscal responsibility - but has a weakness for bling - owed as much as $500,000 to Tiffany in 05 and 06 -

Newt Gingrich touts fiscal responsibility among his qualifications for the presidency, but apparently the 2012 GOP contender has a weakness for bling at Tiffany & Co. The former House speaker owed as much as $500,000 to Tiffany in 2005 and 2006, according to financial disclosures. Though Gingrich retired in 1999, his wife, Callista, was employed by the House Agriculture Committee until 2007 and listed her husband's "revolving charge account" at Tiffany as part of her personal financial disclosure. Gingrich's spokesman has declined to comment about whether the candidate has paid off his debt. Currently, neither of the Gingriches is required to report a personal-finance-disclosure form, but Newt would have to do so as an official presidential candidate.

Read more - http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/gingrich-owed-up-to-500k-to-tiffanyrsquos/debt/?cid=cs:headline9

83 percent of brain injury vaccine compensation payouts were for Autism caused by vaccines -

The federal government has been publicly denying any link between autism and vaccines for over two decades, while it has quietly been paying out damages for vaccine injury to children with autism, a study released May 10th shows. The study underscores the need for Congressional hearings and independent scientific research into the connection between autism and vaccines (http://www.news-medical.net/news/20…).
The federal government’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was created in 1989 to act as a “no fault” taxpayer-funded alternative for those seeking compensation for proven vaccine injury. The new peer-reviewed study, published May 10th in the Pace Environmental Law Review, looked at cases of vaccine injury that have been monetarily compensated by the VICP. The study looked at 1300 cases of children with brain injury resulting from vaccines where the court’s records referenced autism, symptoms of autism or disorders commonly associated with autism — twenty-one cases outright stated “autism or autism-like symptoms” in the court records. The researchers then identified and contacted 150 of the families that were compensated to find out whether the children had autism. 62 of the families they contacted (greater than 40 percent of their sample) reported children with autism, for a total of 83 cases of autism. (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele…).
“What we did is we looked at the people who the government said are clearly vaccine injuries and awarded them compensation,” said Lou Conte, the vaccine compensation recipient who helped coordinate the study.
“We asked the next question and that question was: Do some of these people also have autism?” said Conte. “We found that in 83 of the cases we were able to locate, the families report that their children have autism and symptoms of autism.” (http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/health/n…)
Government and conventional medicine maintain denial
The CDC has since released a statement supporting their previous statements that no link between vaccines and autism exists. (http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/morn…)
Some medical experts agree. While the stories are heartbreaking, said Dr. David Nelson chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Georgetown University Hospital, there is no connection between vaccinations and autism.
“There are absolutely no data that show autism is linked to vaccinations,” said Nelson. (http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/health/n…)
The Health Resources and Services Administration, the Federal agency responsible for improving access to health care services for people who are uninsured, isolated or medically vulnerable, also put out a statement in response to the new study stating:
“The government has not compensated any case based on a determination that autism, in the absence of acute neurological illness, was actually caused by vaccines. Furthermore, there is no reliable scientific evidence that vaccines cause autism even in cases where an acute encephalopathy following vaccination has occurred.”(http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/health/n…)
Critics argue for further investigation
The Huffington Post asked Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy, whose board members authored the study, why anyone should care about the legal proceedings of some obscure court when so much published science says otherwise.
The EBCALA argued that the government officials in Health and human Services or the VICP who decided that the children in this study suffered vaccine injury did so based on science.
“We uncovered that these children also have autism. How can the government then continue to assert that there is no link between vaccines and autism?” said EBCALA directors, “If in fact there is no link, why would there be even one case of vaccine-associated autism, let alone 83?”
Authors of the study called their preliminary findings “the tip of the iceberg,” during a press conference in Washington May 11th.
Hundreds of autism cases have been settled quietly by the government, they say, while thousands more were probably never filed, according to News Medical. There are currently over 5,000 court cases pending that claim autism as a result of vaccine injury. (http://www.news-medical.net/news/20…).
“The [VICP] appears to favor cases without any reference to autism,” said National Autism Association President Wendy Fournier. “The message is clear, if you want to receive financial support for the long-term medical care of your loved one injured by vaccines, submit a claim for brain damage, or residual seizure disorder – but leave autism out of it.”
NAA believes the findings of the new study call into serious question the continued assertion from federal health agencies that vaccines do not cause autism.
“As this study shows, vaccines can and do cause brain damage and subsequent autism in certain children,” said Fournier. “The government has been settling these cases for over twenty years, yet has failed to conduct research into why these children were susceptible to vaccine injury. This neglect will continue to needlessly and senselessly result in adverse reactions and autism in other children.”
Call for congressional hearings
“Congress needs to find out whether there was a cover-up,” said lead author and managing director of EBCALA Mary Holland. “It doesn’t look good.”
SafeMinds says the government has asserted that it “does not track” autism among the vaccine-injured. SafeMinds is a nonprofit that aims to raise awareness, support research and focus attention on the growing evidence of a link between mercury and neurological disorders such as autism, attention deficit disorder and learning difficulties.
Not looking is the easiest way not to find something, said SafeMinds, so the organization is calling for immediate federal research into the mechanisms of injury in these children in an effort to protect other children from harm and Congressional action to reform the VICP.
“This study dramatically shifts the debate on autism and vaccines,” said SafeMinds’ Executive Director, Lyn Redwood. “The question is no longer, Can vaccines cause autism? The answer is clear. Now, we have to ask, How many cases of autism have vaccines caused and how do we prevent new injuries from occurring?”
(http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele…)

HHS announces that Nevada had secured a statewide waiver from Obama administration’s health care law -

Nevada got a partial waiver from the health care law — a significant development that Democrats are dismissing as par for the course and Republicans are claiming as a political victory.

The Health and Human Services Department announced late Friday that Nevada had secured a statewide waiver from certain implementation requirements of the Obama administration’s health care law, because forcing them through, the department found, “may lead to the destabilization of the individual market.”

The announcement makes Nevada one of only three states to have compliance requirements under the health care bill waived.

Nevada’s Insurance Division had appealed to the feds to reduce the federal requirement that health plans serving people who buy insurance on their own must spend at least 80 percent of the money they collect on medical expenses. Under the national rule, companies that don’t spend that percentage of revenue on medical costs have to cut policyholders rebate checks starting this year.

Nevada asked that requirement be reduced to 72 percent for one year, arguing that top insurance providers would be so strapped to make the payments that they’d exit the state market.

Health and Human Services didn’t fully buy that argument, but did agree to reduce the requirement to 75 percent for a year, expressing concern about what might happen to people with policies from insurers Golden Rule and Aetna if they didn’t.

Together, Golden Rule and Aetna cover 24 percent of Nevada’s insured; but they, along with Sierra Health and MEGA, which cover another 4 percent, are spending nowhere near 80 percent of revenue on health care coverage.

The change is less the feds giving underperforming insurance agencies a free pass than buying time for providers to shape up, or policyholders to ship out with reasonable warning time: Nevada has no law that says if you lose insurance because your insurer shuts down, another company has to pick you up. To prevent that, Health and Human Services determined it had to “provide the opportunity for plans with low ‘medical loss ratios’ to adjust their business models to reach 80 percent” with the reduced, 75 percent mandate for the rest of 2011 — that being the average medical loss ratio that the state’s top 10 insurers currently post.

For Republicans, the waiver is proof of what they’ve been arguing all along — that Obama’s health care law was never going to work and has to go.

“It is becoming increasingly clear how flawed this law really is,” Nevada Sen. Dean Heller said in a statement Monday. “Not only did it cut a half trillion dollars from Medicare, impacting thousands of Nevada’s seniors, now the law would have driven health insurers out of our state if a reprieve had not been granted.

“This is why ‘Obamacare’ will not work for Nevada,” Heller said.

But Democrats say that acknowledging it may take Nevada one more year to reach the Obama administration’s goals is a far cry from declaring the health care law deficient. In that catch-up year, they note, underperforming insurance companies will still be required to improve their performance, current customers of those companies will collectively receive a better coverage return on their policies, and there will be more providers to adopt currently uninsured Nevadans.

“Even with this waiver, insurance companies will still have to invest more in providing health care for the families they cover in the Silver State,” said David Cherry, communications director for Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, who voted for Obama’s health care law and continues to support it. “Congresswoman Berkley disagrees with Republicans who believe insurance companies should not have to increase the amount they spend on actually providing health care to Nevadans.”

"One of the primary goals of health insurance reform was to improve care by ensuring that more of patients' premiums are spent on medical care - not bloated CEO salaries and marketing," said Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who has a personal link to the health care law: as majority leader, he steered it through Congress. "Last week's waiver demonstrates the flexibility that states like Nevada have as this important provision becomes implemented over time."

New Hampshire received a similar, but more extensive waiver: It mandates a medical loss ratio of 72 percent for the rest of 2011, and 75 percent in 2012, with the expectation that insurance companies there will meet the 80 percent threshold by 2013. Maine secured the first state waiver. Five more states have applied for waivers and await decisions.

The partial waiver throws a bit of spin the Republicans’ way that’s bound to be a factor as the parties warm up for another round of fights over health care. This time the fights will likely center on changes for fiscal 2012 laid out in the House budget penned by Rep. Paul Ryan, which the entire House Republican caucus — including Heller, who was in the House at the time — has voted for.

That bill would repeal the health care law, removing insurance company spending mandates such as those that were waived, the exchanges and new rules on compulsory coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions — though that is a provision Republicans say they would restore in a replacement — from the health care mix. Ryan’s bill would then restore the $500 billion diverted to some of those items back to Medicare, and begin to convert Medicare to a subsidized insurance market system for those age 55 or younger.

Democrats argue the changes will compromise the purpose of the Medicare system; Republicans counter that change is necessary to stave off disaster, as Medicare is expected to become insolvent by 2024 — five years sooner than expected, according to the board of trustees that oversees the program.

The urgency created by that amended date may be a political windfall for proponents of Ryan’s plan.

In recent weeks, there’s been some uncertainty about the plan, as certain factions of the GOP seem to have slowly distanced themselves from Medicare as a way to slash the budget. Even as Republicans have gone to the stump to defend Ryan’s Medicare changes, other top dogs in the party have indicated they might prefer a solution that would spare the program from cuts or Ryan-esque existential changes, effectively steering clear of the program.

Democrats have remained firmly opposed to Ryan’s plan, though on Monday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she wouldn’t be opposed to discussing changes in Medicare as part of negotiations about raising the debt limit, reached today. The fate of those talks is tightly linked to the budget.

But although the amended exhaustion date of the Medicare fund would appear on its face to swing the political pendulum one tick further in Republicans’ direction, the trustees’ report is not quite so clear on that point. While ratcheting up the doomsday date on Medicare to 2024 from last year’s estimate of 2029, it also lauds Obama’s health care bill for staving off what would have been a much worse scenario. Without the bill, trustees said, Medicare could have been insolvent as early as 2016 — the implication being that if the health care law is repealed, Medicare may well go belly up in just five years.

What is certain is that Friday’s developments are sure to become fresh fodder for an acrimonious political debate about health care, and that these issues will partially pave the campaign trail for both sides.

Nearly 1 in 5 Obamacare waivers go to restaurants, nightclubs, hotels in Pelosi district... -

In response to the revelation that about 20 percent of the latest slew of Obamacare waivers went to luxurious restaurants, nightclubs and hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told The Daily Caller the waiver process is “corrupt.”

“Unflippingbelievable! No, wait, it is believable,” Palin said in an email to TheDC. “Seriously, this is corrupt. And anyone who still supports the Pelosi-Reid-Obama agenda of centralized government takeovers of the free market and the corresponding crony capitalism is, in my book, complicit.”

President Barack Obama’s administration approved 204 new Obamacare waivers in April. Thirty-eight of them went to upscale businesses including four-star hotels, gourmet restaurants, day spas and hip nightclubs in Pelosi’s district. That’s in addition to 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) approved.

Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of upscale, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.

The reason the Obama administration says it has given out waivers is to exempt certain companies or policyholders from “annual limit requirements.” The applications for the waivers are “reviewed on a case-by-case basis by department officials who look at a series of factors including whether or not a premium increase is large or if a significant number of enrollees would lose access to their current plan because the coverage would not be offered in the absence of a waiver.” The waivers don’t allow a company to permanently refrain from implementing Obamacare’s stipulations, but companies can reapply for waivers annually through 2014.

UPDATE: 11:38 a.m.:

House Speaker John Boehner, Ohio Republican, spokesman Michael Steel told TheDC this is another “backroom sweetheart deal” for Obamacare.

“It looks like ObamaCare’s backroom sweetheart deals didn’t end when it became law,” Steel said in an email to TheDC. “Remember when former Speaker Pelosi said we needed to pass the bill to find out what was in it? I guess once they found out, the high-end eateries and spas in her Congressional District weren’t big fans.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/17/gov-sarah-palin-on-pelosi-districts-obamacare-waivers-seriously-this-is-corrupt/#ixzz1MdNFpBtB

China watermelons burst from excess chemicals - farmers abused growth chemicals in an attempt to make extra money -

Watermelon fields in eastern China are a mess of burst fruit after farmers abused growth chemicals in an attempt to make extra money but ended up ruining their crops, state media reported Tuesday.
An investigative report by China Central Television found farms in and around Danyang city in Jiangsu province were losing acres (hectares) of fruit to the problem.
The farmers sprayed forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator, during overly wet weather and put it on too late in the season, which made the melons burst, CCTV said, citing agricultural experts.
It said most watermelons sold at a wholesale market in nearby Shanghai were believed to have been treated with forchlorfenuron. Telltale signs are fibrous, misshapen fruit with mostly white instead of black seeds, it said.
Chinese regulations don't forbid use of the drug, and it is allowed in the United States for use on kiwi fruit and grapes.

But the report underscores how farmers in China are abusing both legal and illegal chemicals, with many farms misusing pesticides and fertilizers.
The government has already voiced alarm over the widespread overuse of food additives like dyes and sweeteners that retailers hope will make food more attractive and boost sales.
The CCTV report colorfully described the watermelons as "land mines" and said they were exploding by the acre (hectare).
The report quoted Feng Shuangqing, a professor at the China Agricultural University, as saying the problem showed that China needs to clarify its farm chemical standards and supervision to protect consumer health.
Danyang farmer Liu Mingsuo ended up with eight acres (three hectares) of ruined fruit and told CCTV he couldn't sleep because he kept picturing exploding watermelons.
"On May 7, I came out and counted 80 (bursting watermelons) but by the afternoon it was 100," Liu said. "Two days later I didn't bother to count anymore."
About 20 farmers and 115 acres (45 hectares) of watermelon around Danyang were affected, it said. Farmers resorted to chopping up the fruit and feeding it to fish and pigs, the broadcaster said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/05/17/chinas-exploding-watermelons-caused-chemical/#ixzz1MbjIDKYX