The Ryan Budget vs Women and Children - GOP Misogeny

Paul Ryan is a dick? Say it ain't so...

The Ryan budget won't ever pass the senate. It has to pass both houses to be put in place. Unless Obama sells out to the Republicans again.

The Weekly Not-So-Funnies

 

FDA scandal re: Approval of Deadly Drug by Board with Pharma Ties

Board members with drug maker ties voted to approve drug that's killing women

Thursday, March 15, 2012 by: Tony Isaacs


(NaturalNews) An investigation by the Washington Monthly and the British Medical Journal has found that at least four members of an advisory board which voted to approve a drug used in birth control pills had either done work for the drugs' manufacturer or received research funds from the manufacturer. Though the four committee members disclosed their ties to the FDA, the FDA decided that the ties did not matter and did not make the disclosures public. Tragically, the drugs the committee endorsed have been killing the women who take them.

The birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin contain a drug called drospirenone, which the FDA advisory committee endorsed last December. According to the Alliance for National Health (ANH), women who take drospirenone are nearly seven times more likely to develop thromboembolism (obstruction of a blood vessel by a blood clot, which can cause deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, stroke, heart attack, and death) than women who do not take any contraceptive pill. Women who take drospirenone have twice the risk of developing thromboembolism than women who take widely prescribed contraceptive pills containing levonorgestrel.

FDA OK's votes by members with financial ties to drug makers but not members who oppose dangerous drugs

Each of the four advisory board members with ties to the pills manufacturer voted in favor of the pills. The committee's decision that the drug's benefits outweighed the risks was decided by a four-vote margin. Interestingly, while the FDA allowed the four members with financial ties to vote on the drug, it barred another member and former researcher, Sidney M. Wolfe, from voting on the grounds that he had "an intellectual conflict of interest". Based on several years of data, Wolfe had advised his readers six years earlier not to take Yaz. Because of this "conflict", he was barred from voting.

In other words, the FDA apparently believes that there is no conflict when someone gets paid by a drug manufacturer but there is a conflict when someone has researched a drug and found it to be dangerous.

The FDA also failed to provide the panel with recently unsealed court documents which revealed that former FDA commissioner David Kessler had accused Bayer of hiding data on blood clot risks associated with the birth control pills. The court documents also revealed that Kessler reported that Bayer paid $450,000 to a high profile gynecologist to sponsor the pill, including off-label use of the drug, during her book tour.

It is far from the first time that the FDA has approved a dangerous drug or overlooked conflicts of interest. It is also far from the first time that drug companies have hid evidence of harm. Think of Vioxx, Fosamaxx, Avandia, and Gardasil to name just a few examples.

It is a common practice for drug companies to pay doctors and scientists to endorse their drugs, the same as it is common for drug companies to offer kickbacks and rewards to doctors who prescribe their drugs. Drug companies also pay doctors, researchers, and other medical experts for "consulting jobs" and speaking engagements to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars - which is considered legal despite the obvious blatant conflict of interest.

With Yaz being the top-selling birth control pill in the US, Bayer has quite the strong vested interest in getting endorsements for Yaz and Yasmin. Though thousands of women have filed lawsuits against Bayer, saying they were injured by Yaz or Yasmin, as we have seen with other highly profitable dangerous drugs, drug makers typically consider such lawsuits merely part of the price of doing business.

Sources included:

http://www.anh-usa.org/fda-huge-conflicts-of-interest-with-big-pharma/
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com
http://www.naturalnews.com/034443_FDA_advisory_panel_corruption.html
http://www.allgov.com

The Human Cost of Slashonomics: "Recovery" Leaves Women Behind (2 articles)

Monday, March 21, 2011 by The Nation

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

 

An important new initiative from Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years, and the Coalition on Human Needs, is putting a face on irresponsible “slash and burn” deficit reduction by showing how it would damage real lives. The organizations are collecting people’s stories so that the cruel consequences of draconian cuts to key federal programs are plain to see.

Consider the story of Carolyn, who was in her 40s when her husband of 25 years left her with two daughters. She had never received any kind of assistance and describes turning to her local community action agency as “the hardest thing I had ever done.” Her fears were quickly allayed as she “was treated with respect and was never made to feel like a drain on society.” She enrolled in a workforce development program that helped her with tuition and books while she attended community college. 

“I went to college five days a week and spent the weekend working, so I never had a day off,” writes Carolyn. “When I graduated I became a Registered Nurse, able to support myself and my family. I couldn’t have done it without the Federal Workforce Development Program and the supportive services the local Community Action Agency provided.”

But the Boehner-led “so be it” Republicans would nearly eliminate funding for Community Service Block Grants (CSBG) for the remainder of 2011, and President Obama proposes cutting it in half in 2012. The cuts would disrupt the antipoverty services provided by 1,065 community action agencies nationwide to over 20 million low-income people, including 5 million children, 2.3 million seniors and 1.7 million people with disabilities. What makes the cuts even more insane is that the agencies generate $6.54 from state, local, and private sources for every federal dollar received, according to the Coalition on Human Needs.

People like Carolyn would be hit doubly hard—not only would the community action agencies reach fewer people, but the kind of workforce development programs that allowed her to change her life would also be slashed by Republicans. In fact, at a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, more than 8 million adults and youth would lose access to job training and other employment services. Job training under the Workforce Investment Act programs for adults, youths, and dislocated workers would essentially be shut down until July 2012.

But, hey, at least folks can turn to higher education, right? Actually, not really. At a time when the US is now 12^th in the world in the percentage of 25 to 34 year olds with a college degree, the GOP bill would result in 9.4 million low-income college students losing all or some of their Pell grant. It would reduce the maximum Pell grant by a whopping 17.4 percent! (Obama would increase Pell Grant funding by 20 percent.)

The GOP cuts would be a disaster for students like this senior at University of Missouri who anonymously writes, “I will be applying to medical school at the end of this year. I come from a single-parent household and my mother makes about $20,000/year; hardly enough to put me through college. Without federal aid such as the Pell Grant, I would not have enough money to attend college at all.”

The student also works as a medical assistant at Planned Parenthood, where the GOP would eliminate all federal funding. That means zero funding for 820 health centers that do 90 percent of their work on preventive, primary care.

“I know first-hand how important the services we provide to people really are,” writes the Mizzou student. “The majority of our patients literally cannot afford to go anywhere else, and without our care, they simply would not receive services such as cancer screenings, birth control, and so much more.”

Nor would many of them be able to heat their homes, if the Chainsaw Republicans have their way, and President Obama’s 2012 budget isn’t much better. Despite the fact that a record number of households are expected to need assistance to pay for heating or cooling, the cuts in the GOP bill would essentially wipe out the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) contingency fund for 2011. The contingency fund provides aid during periods of particularly severe weather or energy price increases. Obama’s cut of about $2.5 billion would deny assistance to more than three million households.

That doesn’t sit very well with Kimberly Thompson, who turned to her local community action agency when her 89 year old, very independent grandmother was facing “nursing home institutionalization.” Through the CSBG, the agency was able to purchase a walker for her, deliver a hot lunch daily, and “provide a home care worker to do light housekeeping and help her with personal care.” The agency also signed her up for LIHEAP and “weatherized her home which lowered her utility bills and gave her more money each month to buy food and medicine.”

“All of these services enabled my grandmother to stay at home for the rest of her life until she died at the age of 92, three years later,” writes Thompson. “If she didn’t have those community services, she would have had to move to a nursing home which would have been a much greater cost to the government—and therefore, the taxpayers—and also would have caused her much emotional distress.”

What is most maddening about the budget debate is that few legislators are talking about alternatives like increasing revenues by closing obscene tax loopholes and corporate giveaways and making the wealthy pay their fair share. Instead, the proposals hit the most vulnerable people the hardest—lower-income people, children, seniors, people with disabilities, unemployed workers, and others. (For a “Better Budget for All” check out this report.)

Kudos to Half in Ten and the Coalition on Human Needs for collecting these stories and making these budget cuts real. If you have a story to tell, please share it. The only way we win this budget battle is to show the very real consequences of these abstract numbers being thrown around Washington, DC, and then organize and demand alternatives.

+++++++

Monday, March 21, 2011 by The Baltimore Sun
Recession hurt male-dominated sectors, but hiring is lagging for women

by Lorraine Mirabella 

 

It became known as the "mancession" because the recent downturn battered industries dominated by men.


But the economic battle of the sexes has taken a turn. While the nation's nascent recovery has been slow and bumpy for just about everyone, it has been almost nonexistent for women.
Of the 1.3 million jobs gained in the U.S. in the past year, 1.1 million — nearly 90 percent — went to men, Department of Labor statistics show. Women gained just 149,000 jobs during that time. If you count jobs since the recovery officially started in July 2009, men gained more than 600,000 jobs while women lost 300,000, the figures show.

"The recovery is really not happening for women at all," said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women's Law Center in Washington. "It's a slow recovery overall, but it's really leaving women behind."

Some of the disproportionate gains by men were expected because women lost far fewer jobs during the recession, but economists say that doesn't fully explain the trend. Economists point out that public sector jobs more likely to be held by women are disappearing. And some hypothesize that jobless men have been making inroads in sectors traditionally dominated by women.

But for women who have struggled for their place in the American work force — from Rosie the Riveter to Carol Bartz, the Yahoo CEO ranked as the highest-paid woman in the U.S. — this is another painful chapter.

For Annie McLhinney-Cochran, 52, of Havre de Grace, the hunt for a new job has gone nowhere for three years. She recently left San Diego to relocate to Maryland with her husband, who had lost a construction job. She has years of marketing and public relations experience and was convinced her prospects would improve on the East Coast.

"Never has it been this tough," she said. "I think women our age, those 50 on up and getting ready to retire, are the ones getting hit the most."

In San Diego, "we were just kind of making it. Some friends and family have helped. My husband had a few odd jobs. I was one of those people hanging on and hanging on," said McLhinney-Cochran. "It's an awful situation, and I don't see a lot of relief."

While women account for roughly half of the work force, a White House report released this month showed persistent pay gaps between men and women at all levels of education, with women earning about 75 percent as much as their male colleagues. Older female workers face greater pay disparity than their younger counterparts — as 25- to 34-year-olds earn 89 percent as much as men, according to the 2009 statistics.

As the nation begins to crawl out of the deep recession, women are regaining jobs at a much slower pace than they lost them. Women accounted for one of every three lost jobs in the recession, but they're filling just one in every 10 jobs added. And unemployment for women is on the rise.

"It's very frightening because long-term unemployment has worsened," Entmacher said. "It's also alarming because women make up half the labor force and women's wages are so much bigger a piece of the family budget. This is a real crisis for families, especially those headed by women."

Click here to read the rest.

What Men And Women Are Doing On Facebook

Saw this on another blog and had to share...

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What Men And Women Are Doing On Facebook
Jenna Goudreau, 04.26.10

"The world's gone social. And women are more social than men." --Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Facebook, the largest social networking tool in the world, is dominated by women.

According to BrianSolis.com and Google Ad Planner, the 400-million member site is 57% female and attracts 46 million more female visitors than male visitors per month. Plus, women are more active on Facebook. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says women on Facebook have 8% more friends and participate in 62% of the sharing. "The social world is led by women," she concludes. And they're leading that charge online.

Where Do Women Social Network? Top 10 Sites

Women are the majority of users on many of the biggest social networking sites, including Twitter, MySpace, Bebo and Flickr. Men, meanwhile, are most active on sites like Digg, YouTube and LinkedIn, which are more content-oriented and promotional than discussion-based.

However, women don't just visit different sites from men, they use social media differently than men. Experts believe the difference between how men and women operate online mirror their motivations offline. While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status.

"We're women--we like to talk about things. Women use social media as a way to connect," says Jodi Kahn, the head of iVillage. A recent joint study from BlogHer and iVillage supports her theory, reporting that three-quarters of women use online communities to stay up to date with friends and family, and 68% use them to "connect with others like me."

On message boards and forums, Kahn says that both sexes seek information and advice, but women tend to get more personal. She says women want to learn about real people experiencing similar conflicts. "Women are online solving real-life issues. If I'm a mom who is about to start potty training, it's important to me to hear how other real moms are doing it," says Kahn.

Men, on the other hand, are researchers and social climbers. Professor of social media marketing at UC Berkeley, Lorrie Thomas, says men use social media as an "interactive Rolodex," storing contact information for future use.

Sherry Perlmutter Bowen, a gender and communication professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, says she's seeing men use social media to gather information and boost their influence. "I see males espousing their wisdom on social media sites and using social media to sell, to compete, to 'climb the ladder,'" she says.

According to Bowen, these gender differences are rooted in communication styles learned since birth. "Girls and boys are often raised in two distinct cultures where they learn different rules and norms for behavior and talk: Girls learn to build relationships by sharing social information. Boys learn to compare and compete with others, always striving for more success."

Psychologist Leslie Sokol, author of self-help book Think Confident, Be Confident, believes virtual communication differences between men and women can be tracked back through history as evolutionary methods of survival. Throughout time, males have been in competition with each other, even in the animal kingdom, she says. "The sexiest bird with the brightest plumage and best territory got all the women." Because it was in their best interest not to show weaknesses or give away their strategies, men became more reserved as an adaptive method, she says.

Sokol believes that women, the gatherers and community builders, had to work as a team to survive. They needed to use each other as resources and adapted to be more supportive by sharing their plans, shortcomings and advice. Today, women are still more likely to be forthcoming and verbose than men, she says, a difference that is reflected online.

Diana Windley, 39, is a good example. The assistant vice president of marketing at Goldenwest Credit Union in Utah uses several networking sites mainly to keep up with friends and read and discuss things she likes, rather than using it for business or promotional purposes. She also blogs about her life as career mom. Everyday she signs into Facebook to reconnect with old friends from high school and college and to build new relationships with neighbors and extended family. On Twitter she aims to make connections with people who aren't in her immediate circle but share similar interests in career, parenting and religion.

On the other hand, Allen Chen, 31, a communications assistant at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, uses networking sites as mediums to discuss ideas rather than share personal information. He logs onto Facebook several times a day to post interesting articles, which solicit responses from his 175 friends. He also uses Twitter to keep up on current events by following news outlets and "strangers" who share common interests in sports and technology.

Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder and chief operating officer of BlogHer, believes men leverage social media for broadcasting their ideas and skills vs. women who find connections with others by sharing the ups and downs of their daily lives.

Men are more active blog participants, she explains. They are more likely to read, write and post comments to blogs. Surprisingly, both men and women report that their most common blog topic is "my life," she says. However, the second most popular topic for men is business and career, and food and fashion are tied in second place for women.

Men are also more active users of YouTube, with about 20% more men visiting the video-sharing site per week, according to the BlogHer-iVillage study. Camahort Page believes men prefer the site because it is more passive. "[YouTube] is about finding, consuming and passing along content, but it's not about conversation."

Not surprisingly, the different ways men and women approach social media are beginning to be noticed and exploited by advertisers. Scott Staab, group creative director of marketing agency T3, whose clients include JCPenney and UPS, has recently been interested in women social gamers. Women are the majority of online social gamers (such as the Facebook application FarmVille) and often play with their friends, he explains.

Staab says that a woman who advocates for a brand online is more likely to influence her friends. "Some of our clients skew highly female, and we are going into social gaming because it's an area that we know women spend more time." Companies would be smart to create their own games to draw in users, Staab says, because "it doesn't have to be about pushing product all the time. It's about brand engagement."

According to Kelly O'Neill, director of product marketing at e-commerce software firm ATG, beauty store Sephora targets women by tapping into social networking sites to advertise promotions and sales. In a recent ATG survey, twice as many women as men said they frequently share purchasing activities on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. So Sephora advertises promotions with its Facebook page and often tweets about sales to its Twitter followers. Plus, fashion brands Tommy Hilfiger and Urban Outfitters have honed in on women's dominance in social media by creating virtual fashion shows to engage them online.

Patty Kennedy, founder of communications firm Kennedy Spencer, uses her knowledge of gendered behavior on social networking sites to better target men and women for her clients, which include Coca-Cola and P&G. Kennedy Spencer uses "transactional" sites like LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter to attract men, sharing content like articles, facts and games that they hope will spark their interest. It uses conversation-based sites like Facebook and "mom blogs" to spark dialogue among women.

Says Facebook's Sandberg, "If you reach women [online], they will tell their friends." What may be an evolutionary fact turns out to be a marketer's dream.

Mens ideal, womens ideal and the national average (NSFW?)