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Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
The Liar Strikes Again!
By: Steve Benen on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
* w w w .crooksandliars . com /2007/10/30/the-serial-exaggerator-strikes-again/
Rudy Giuliani, whose record for jaw-dropping exaggerations is unmatched,
apparently just can't help himself.
OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the survival rate
from prostate cancer is much higher in America than in Britain, thus
supposedly proving the failure of socialized medicine.
The problem is that his claim is just plain FALSE. In fact, mortality rates
from prostate cancer are almost the same in America and Britain.
So, will this get as much attention as, say, the Edwards haircut or the
Hillary laugh? Will it get any coverage at all? Bear in mind that health
care is a central domestic issue of this election - and Rudy has just showed
that he doesn't know a thing about it.
A Washington Post reporter recently suggested political reporters will get
around to scrutinizing Giuliani's whoppers at some point in the future. Now
seems like a perfectly good time, doesn't it?
-------------------------
AMERICA'S MARTINET: The DANGEROUS Candidacy of Rudy Giuliani
The mass media sometimes calls him "America's mayor." Critics label him a
dangerous fascist. Whether he's the alleged hero who "took charge" on
September 11, 2001, or the frightening face of a new American Reich, it
appears Rudolph Giuliani will carry George W. Bush's torch into the 2008
presidential election.
When Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Before picking up the "hero" moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in
the city he governed as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug. These
accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former New
York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
why the First Amendment is so important." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
American freedom twenty-seven times!
More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his
administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely, First
Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on doing the
one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids:
using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of
government itself."
Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case of
Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a dictator
and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police state.
Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not by street
cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying his art at
political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All were false
arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.
In a similar fashion and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only good
thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response to
criticism thus often proves it was highly justified.
According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post, now
New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."
Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from Giuliani's
totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would improve the
"quality of life" in New York by punishing trivial violations such as
jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and panhandling, and
even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent expressions of free
speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed and dragged off to
jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front stoops - the New York City
equivalent of hanging out on the porch. Marijuana possession arrests
increased by well over 4,000 percent. Arrests were even made for such
things as riding a bike without a bell on it and sitting on milk crates on
the sidewalk.
Giuliani's courtship of rogue police officers and seduction of the NYPD to
become his personal Gestapo began in September 1992, when he addressed an
angry rally of cops protesting then-mayor Dinkins's proposal for a civilian
board to review police misconduct.
It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty cops
drank heavily (a violation for which, under Giuliani, many citizens would
later be arrested), and a few waved signs like "Dump the Washroom
Attendant," a racist reference to mayor Dinkins. Twice, Giuliani called the
Dinkins proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered, and Giuliani was jubilant.
"Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot," Mr. Dinkins stated.
As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were blatant.
For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the Asian-American
community for their New Years celebration, a religious and cultural
tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined Chinatown
streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even refused to allow
a permit for a professionally supervised display. The Christian equivalent
of this would be banning Christmas trees and decorations because they
occasionally start fires. Giuliani never relented on this. On the Jewish
festival of Purim however, when fireworks are used in the streets of Jewish
neighborhoods, the police continued to look the other way! They also
ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood streets to destroy leavened
bread before Passover. Can you imagine the police response to this in any
poor, Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American community? Giuliani's lasting
legacy is that in New York fireworks are OK on Purim, but celebrate the 4th
of July with them and you can get busted. So much for "Independence" Day.
Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance policy
as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of fighting
crime, Giuliani had thus transformed the NYPD into his own private Gestapo,
going as far as assigning two NYPD detectives, at taxpayer expense, as
round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This after his closing down
all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"
Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a "rogue
operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." Fashion-wise,
the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military death squads,
wearing "We Own the Night" t-shirts, and shirts citing Ernest Hemingway's
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote - quite a variation from
standard issue uniforms!
This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent African
immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet after being
ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the streets to
protest the unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that people were
protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."
Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe sadistically
shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the same object into
his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized with serious
injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these sadists said to
him "This is Giuliani time!"
When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner.
Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during his
tenure, but he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to
take credit for this. During this period crime dropped similarly
nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
methods.
Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
units in the police department. When plainclothes cops asked a black man on
the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took offense
to being called a drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the unidentified
officers, who then SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a knee-jerk defense of
the killer cops, telling the press that Dorismond was "no altar boy."
Salon . com pointed out that in fact he WAS an altar boy! Desperate to
justify the killing, Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of Dorismond's
sealed juvenile record - for disorderly conduct! It seems that under
Giuliani, this justifies the death penalty. Giuliani's contribution to
Dorismond's funeral was a squadron of police in full riot gear, inciting
violence that would not have occurred without their unnecessary and
disrespectful presence.
Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani, stated:
"There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity - He was
barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race." Giuliani's
vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor, Mayor Bloomberg:
"You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani administration],
everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race" -
quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair magazine.
By the time his ship came in on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's approval
rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, had hit a Bush-like 37
percent. Hizzoner got downright weird, proposing a Taliban-style "decency
panel," operated out of his office, that would have the power to determine
what would be considered "art" in New York City. This came after the
debacle of Giuliani's failed attempt to cut public funding for the Brooklyn
Museum because he considered art on exhibit there to be offensive. He also
began having nightclubs lacking a cabaret license raided by the police for
allowing patrons to dance. And early in 2001 he ordered a city-wide ban on
pet ferrets, claiming there was something "deranged" about opponents of the
ban, and that "excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness."
In desperation to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani seized upon
any and every opportunity to appear the "hero." Despite demanding a
crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and reported in the
press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.
Giuliani's perhaps most criminally negligent if not malevolent pretense to
heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as an
impending disaster, and came on like a knight in shining armor with a
solution. His solution was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has
caused and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11
assurances that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had the entire
city repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic
insecticide, and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety
precautions in doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to prove
in such environmental poisoning cases than when the police are ordered to
falsely arrest someone, or tacitly encouraged to brutally beat suspects or
shoot them to death.
Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead or dying therefrom,
former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground Zero
workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts, and also
that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned with its
image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the wake of
the subsequent anthrax scare.
Jerome Hauer was the city's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000,
and is recognized as a leading expert on biological and chemical terrorism.
"Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am speaking now," Mr
Hauer told London's The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a control freak who
micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational character trait and picks
fights just to score points. He's the last thing this country needs as
president." Mr Hauer also accused Mr Giuliani of failing to sort out turf
battles between the city's police and fire departments, and of appointing
inexperienced cronies to key positions.
Pet ferrets weren't the only ones to get the boot in Giuliani's New York.
Hizzoner boasted of moving people from welfare to workfare, where thousands
of people earned less than two dollars per hour replacing an equivalent
number of parks department employees whose positions were downsized. During
this period, 13,000 welfare-dependent City University students were FORCED
TO LEAVE COLLEGE and enter the menial workfare force, where less than six
percent of participants transition to real employment paying minimum wage or
more. In this we see Giuliani's cruel rewarding of riches and punishing
poverty, as if wealth and poverty were not inherently rewarding and
punishing conditions.
Mega-real estate developer Donald Trump described Giuliani as "maybe the
best [mayor] ever," obviously meaning the most profitable for him. However,
Ralph Nader called him "the oligarch's mayor." Giuliani took credit for a
high-end real estate boom while presiding over double-digit rises in
homelessness, cutting public spending on affordable housing by nearly half
and housing for the homeless by nearly three quarters.
Today, "America's mayor" lives and breathes a 9/11 mantra. Forget the
pathetic, cruel, even sadistic details of his tenure in Gracie Mansion; he
is now portrayed as an iconic American hero
- the "leader" we needed when George W. Bush was otherwise occupied on
September 11, 2001.
But was Giuliani really a hero on that infamous day of horror?
Just like Bush, Giuliani's failing political career was rescued by the
terrorists that attacked New York and Washington on 9/11. Some believe
these terrorists had help from within the US government, and even that some
within the government itself were the terrorists. To find criminals, one
must consider who most benefited from the crime.
It is strange if not truly sinister that Giuliani stat
The Liar Strikes Again!
By: Steve Benen on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
* w w w .crooksandliars . com /2007/10/30/the-serial-exaggerator-strikes-again/
Rudy Giuliani, whose record for jaw-dropping exaggerations is unmatched,
apparently just can't help himself.
OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the survival rate
from prostate cancer is much higher in America than in Britain, thus
supposedly proving the failure of socialized medicine.
The problem is that his claim is just plain FALSE. In fact, mortality rates
from prostate cancer are almost the same in America and Britain.
So, will this get as much attention as, say, the Edwards haircut or the
Hillary laugh? Will it get any coverage at all? Bear in mind that health
care is a central domestic issue of this election - and Rudy has just showed
that he doesn't know a thing about it.
A Washington Post reporter recently suggested political reporters will get
around to scrutinizing Giuliani's whoppers at some point in the future. Now
seems like a perfectly good time, doesn't it?
-------------------------
AMERICA'S MARTINET: The DANGEROUS Candidacy of Rudy Giuliani
The mass media sometimes calls him "America's mayor." Critics label him a
dangerous fascist. Whether he's the alleged hero who "took charge" on
September 11, 2001, or the frightening face of a new American Reich, it
appears Rudolph Giuliani will carry George W. Bush's torch into the 2008
presidential election.
When Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Before picking up the "hero" moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in
the city he governed as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug. These
accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former New
York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
why the First Amendment is so important." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
American freedom twenty-seven times!
More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his
administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely, First
Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on doing the
one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids:
using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of
government itself."
Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case of
Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a dictator
and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police state.
Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not by street
cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying his art at
political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All were false
arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.
In a similar fashion and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only good
thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response to
criticism thus often proves it was highly justified.
According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post, now
New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."
Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from Giuliani's
totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would improve the
"quality of life" in New York by punishing trivial violations such as
jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and panhandling, and
even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent expressions of free
speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed and dragged off to
jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front stoops - the New York City
equivalent of hanging out on the porch. Marijuana possession arrests
increased by well over 4,000 percent. Arrests were even made for such
things as riding a bike without a bell on it and sitting on milk crates on
the sidewalk.
Giuliani's courtship of rogue police officers and seduction of the NYPD to
become his personal Gestapo began in September 1992, when he addressed an
angry rally of cops protesting then-mayor Dinkins's proposal for a civilian
board to review police misconduct.
It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty cops
drank heavily (a violation for which, under Giuliani, many citizens would
later be arrested), and a few waved signs like "Dump the Washroom
Attendant," a racist reference to mayor Dinkins. Twice, Giuliani called the
Dinkins proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered, and Giuliani was jubilant.
"Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot," Mr. Dinkins stated.
As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were blatant.
For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the Asian-American
community for their New Years celebration, a religious and cultural
tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined Chinatown
streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even refused to allow
a permit for a professionally supervised display. The Christian equivalent
of this would be banning Christmas trees and decorations because they
occasionally start fires. Giuliani never relented on this. On the Jewish
festival of Purim however, when fireworks are used in the streets of Jewish
neighborhoods, the police continued to look the other way! They also
ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood streets to destroy leavened
bread before Passover. Can you imagine the police response to this in any
poor, Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American community? Giuliani's lasting
legacy is that in New York fireworks are OK on Purim, but celebrate the 4th
of July with them and you can get busted. So much for "Independence" Day.
Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance policy
as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of fighting
crime, Giuliani had thus transformed the NYPD into his own private Gestapo,
going as far as assigning two NYPD detectives, at taxpayer expense, as
round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This after his closing down
all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"
Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a "rogue
operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." Fashion-wise,
the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military death squads,
wearing "We Own the Night" t-shirts, and shirts citing Ernest Hemingway's
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote - quite a variation from
standard issue uniforms!
This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent African
immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet after being
ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the streets to
protest the unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that people were
protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."
Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe sadistically
shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the same object into
his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized with serious
injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these sadists said to
him "This is Giuliani time!"
When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner.
Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during his
tenure, but he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to
take credit for this. During this period crime dropped similarly
nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
methods.
Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
units in the police department. When plainclothes cops asked a black man on
the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took offense
to being called a drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the unidentified
officers, who then SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a knee-jerk defense of
the killer cops, telling the press that Dorismond was "no altar boy."
Salon . com pointed out that in fact he WAS an altar boy! Desperate to
justify the killing, Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of Dorismond's
sealed juvenile record - for disorderly conduct! It seems that under
Giuliani, this justifies the death penalty. Giuliani's contribution to
Dorismond's funeral was a squadron of police in full riot gear, inciting
violence that would not have occurred without their unnecessary and
disrespectful presence.
Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani, stated:
"There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity - He was
barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race." Giuliani's
vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor, Mayor Bloomberg:
"You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani administration],
everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race" -
quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair magazine.
By the time his ship came in on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's approval
rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, had hit a Bush-like 37
percent. Hizzoner got downright weird, proposing a Taliban-style "decency
panel," operated out of his office, that would have the power to determine
what would be considered "art" in New York City. This came after the
debacle of Giuliani's failed attempt to cut public funding for the Brooklyn
Museum because he considered art on exhibit there to be offensive. He also
began having nightclubs lacking a cabaret license raided by the police for
allowing patrons to dance. And early in 2001 he ordered a city-wide ban on
pet ferrets, claiming there was something "deranged" about opponents of the
ban, and that "excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness."
In desperation to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani seized upon
any and every opportunity to appear the "hero." Despite demanding a
crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and reported in the
press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.
Giuliani's perhaps most criminally negligent if not malevolent pretense to
heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as an
impending disaster, and came on like a knight in shining armor with a
solution. His solution was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has
caused and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11
assurances that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had the entire
city repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic
insecticide, and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety
precautions in doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to prove
in such environmental poisoning cases than when the police are ordered to
falsely arrest someone, or tacitly encouraged to brutally beat suspects or
shoot them to death.
Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead or dying therefrom,
former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground Zero
workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts, and also
that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned with its
image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the wake of
the subsequent anthrax scare.
Jerome Hauer was the city's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000,
and is recognized as a leading expert on biological and chemical terrorism.
"Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am speaking now," Mr
Hauer told London's The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a control freak who
micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational character trait and picks
fights just to score points. He's the last thing this country needs as
president." Mr Hauer also accused Mr Giuliani of failing to sort out turf
battles between the city's police and fire departments, and of appointing
inexperienced cronies to key positions.
Pet ferrets weren't the only ones to get the boot in Giuliani's New York.
Hizzoner boasted of moving people from welfare to workfare, where thousands
of people earned less than two dollars per hour replacing an equivalent
number of parks department employees whose positions were downsized. During
this period, 13,000 welfare-dependent City University students were FORCED
TO LEAVE COLLEGE and enter the menial workfare force, where less than six
percent of participants transition to real employment paying minimum wage or
more. In this we see Giuliani's cruel rewarding of riches and punishing
poverty, as if wealth and poverty were not inherently rewarding and
punishing conditions.
Mega-real estate developer Donald Trump described Giuliani as "maybe the
best [mayor] ever," obviously meaning the most profitable for him. However,
Ralph Nader called him "the oligarch's mayor." Giuliani took credit for a
high-end real estate boom while presiding over double-digit rises in
homelessness, cutting public spending on affordable housing by nearly half
and housing for the homeless by nearly three quarters.
Today, "America's mayor" lives and breathes a 9/11 mantra. Forget the
pathetic, cruel, even sadistic details of his tenure in Gracie Mansion; he
is now portrayed as an iconic American hero
- the "leader" we needed when George W. Bush was otherwise occupied on
September 11, 2001.
But was Giuliani really a hero on that infamous day of horror?
Just like Bush, Giuliani's failing political career was rescued by the
terrorists that attacked New York and Washington on 9/11. Some believe
these terrorists had help from within the US government, and even that some
within the government itself were the terrorists. To find criminals, one
must consider who most benefited from the crime.
It is strange if not truly sinister that Giuliani stat
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
> ...
> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
> survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
> than in Britain ...
Leaving aside questions about socialized medicine and about Rudi
Giuliani, I found conflicting evidence about this claim, some of
which might support Rudi G and some of which might not.
The latest figures I could get were from 2005. The US had around
295 million people, and the UK around 60 million people at that
time.
* info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/mortality/#source1
reports (based on UK Office for National Statistics) that 10,000
men died of prostate cancer in the UK that year. In the same
year there were about 30,000 deaths from PCa in the US (see
Wikipedia, US SEER statistics, etc.)
So the raw rates are:
UK: 10,000 / 60,000,000 = .000166
US: 30,000 / 295,000,000 = .000107
The US death rate from PCa appears to be substantially lower.
If we look at death rate compared to the number of people
diagnosed, the US fares even better because more people are
diagnosed in the US due to the fact that PCa is detected
earlier here by PSA screening - which is not as often used in
the UK.
A BBC news article: * news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2077996.stm
also claims significantly higher survival rates for breast and
colon cancer in the US as compared to the UK, and says that 58%
of British patients are diagnosed with PCa in the early stages of
the disease compared to 70% of patients in the US.
There is some World Health Organization data at:
* w w w .who.int/entity/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestimates.xls
The latest data I found there was from 2002. It claimed that
death rates from PCa in the US and UK were 12.1 and 18.6 deaths
per thousand deaths (I think - if I understand the stats)
respectively. The numbers are expressed in different terms, but
the ratios are similar.
On the other hand, I also found a web page claiming the death
rates were the same, but I can't seem to find it again to get the
citation.
The issue is more complicated than it seems. In the UK, death
rates from PCa are very high for men aged 85 and older. It may
be that age adjusted rates look different from the population
rates. If more men die from other causes before they reach age
85 in the US than in the UK, that might bias the statistics and
make the UK rate look worse than it really is.
The WHO life expectancies at birth for the two countries in 2005
are:
( * w w w .who.int/whosis/database/life_tables/
life_tables_process.cfm?path=whosis,life_tables&language=english)
UK men: 76.6 years
US men: 75.3 years
But at any rate (forgive the pun) I'm not prepared to say Rudi G
lied. At the very least, it appears that there is documentary
support for his view - indicating that, even if it turns out he
was wrong, he may have had a reasonable belief that he was right.
Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
character assassination says more to me about the character of
the writer than of the person he writes about.
Alan Meyer
(my real name)
On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
> ...
> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
> survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
> than in Britain ...
Leaving aside questions about socialized medicine and about Rudi
Giuliani, I found conflicting evidence about this claim, some of
which might support Rudi G and some of which might not.
The latest figures I could get were from 2005. The US had around
295 million people, and the UK around 60 million people at that
time.
* info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/mortality/#source1
reports (based on UK Office for National Statistics) that 10,000
men died of prostate cancer in the UK that year. In the same
year there were about 30,000 deaths from PCa in the US (see
Wikipedia, US SEER statistics, etc.)
So the raw rates are:
UK: 10,000 / 60,000,000 = .000166
US: 30,000 / 295,000,000 = .000107
The US death rate from PCa appears to be substantially lower.
If we look at death rate compared to the number of people
diagnosed, the US fares even better because more people are
diagnosed in the US due to the fact that PCa is detected
earlier here by PSA screening - which is not as often used in
the UK.
A BBC news article: * news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2077996.stm
also claims significantly higher survival rates for breast and
colon cancer in the US as compared to the UK, and says that 58%
of British patients are diagnosed with PCa in the early stages of
the disease compared to 70% of patients in the US.
There is some World Health Organization data at:
* w w w .who.int/entity/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestimates.xls
The latest data I found there was from 2002. It claimed that
death rates from PCa in the US and UK were 12.1 and 18.6 deaths
per thousand deaths (I think - if I understand the stats)
respectively. The numbers are expressed in different terms, but
the ratios are similar.
On the other hand, I also found a web page claiming the death
rates were the same, but I can't seem to find it again to get the
citation.
The issue is more complicated than it seems. In the UK, death
rates from PCa are very high for men aged 85 and older. It may
be that age adjusted rates look different from the population
rates. If more men die from other causes before they reach age
85 in the US than in the UK, that might bias the statistics and
make the UK rate look worse than it really is.
The WHO life expectancies at birth for the two countries in 2005
are:
( * w w w .who.int/whosis/database/life_tables/
life_tables_process.cfm?path=whosis,life_tables&language=english)
UK men: 76.6 years
US men: 75.3 years
But at any rate (forgive the pun) I'm not prepared to say Rudi G
lied. At the very least, it appears that there is documentary
support for his view - indicating that, even if it turns out he
was wrong, he may have had a reasonable belief that he was right.
Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
character assassination says more to me about the character of
the writer than of the person he writes about.
Alan Meyer
(my real name)
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
Alan Meyer wrote:
> On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
>> ...
>> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
>> survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
>> than in Britain ...
>
> Leaving aside questions about socialized medicine and about Rudi
> Giuliani, I found conflicting evidence about this claim, some of
> which might support Rudi G and some of which might not.
>
> The latest figures I could get were from 2005. The US had around
> 295 million people, and the UK around 60 million people at that
> time.
>
> * info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/mortality/#source1
>
> reports (based on UK Office for National Statistics) that 10,000
> men died of prostate cancer in the UK that year. In the same
> year there were about 30,000 deaths from PCa in the US (see
> Wikipedia, US SEER statistics, etc.)
>
> So the raw rates are:
>
> UK: 10,000 / 60,000,000 = .000166
> US: 30,000 / 295,000,000 = .000107
>
> The US death rate from PCa appears to be substantially lower.
>
> If we look at death rate compared to the number of people
> diagnosed, the US fares even better because more people are
> diagnosed in the US due to the fact that PCa is detected
> earlier here by PSA screening - which is not as often used in
> the UK.
>
> A BBC news article: * news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2077996.stm
> also claims significantly higher survival rates for breast and
> colon cancer in the US as compared to the UK, and says that 58%
> of British patients are diagnosed with PCa in the early stages of
> the disease compared to 70% of patients in the US.
>
> There is some World Health Organization data at:
> * w w w .who.int/entity/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestimates.xls
>
> The latest data I found there was from 2002. It claimed that
> death rates from PCa in the US and UK were 12.1 and 18.6 deaths
> per thousand deaths (I think - if I understand the stats)
> respectively. The numbers are expressed in different terms, but
> the ratios are similar.
>
> On the other hand, I also found a web page claiming the death
> rates were the same, but I can't seem to find it again to get the
> citation.
>
> The issue is more complicated than it seems. In the UK, death
> rates from PCa are very high for men aged 85 and older. It may
> be that age adjusted rates look different from the population
> rates. If more men die from other causes before they reach age
> 85 in the US than in the UK, that might bias the statistics and
> make the UK rate look worse than it really is.
>
> The WHO life expectancies at birth for the two countries in 2005
> are:
> ( * w w w .who.int/whosis/database/life tables/
> life tables process.cfm?path=whosis,life tables&language=english)
>
> UK men: 76.6 years
> US men: 75.3 years
>
>
> But at any rate (forgive the pun) I'm not prepared to say Rudi G
> lied. At the very least, it appears that there is documentary
> support for his view - indicating that, even if it turns out he
> was wrong, he may have had a reasonable belief that he was right.
>
> Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
> for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
> slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
> pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
> least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
> character assassination says more to me about the character of
> the writer than of the person he writes about.
>
> Alan Meyer
> (my real name)
>
There are several factors which affect prostate cancer rates in the US
and the UK. One is that in the US, physicians took up PSA testing in a
big way in the early 90s, while in the UK and some other European
countries, this was not done. Today, even in the US, there is still
debate about whther or not routine PSA testing is justified. I think
the evidence does show it is effective, but in principle this should be
established by a randomized prospective study. There is one such study
going on now and its results may be forthcoming in a few years. That
might clarify the situation somewhat, but it is too much to expect it
will eliminate all doubts. The reason is that it is just very difficult
to conduct such studies for diseases with long time lines.
Recently, UK physicians appear to be doing more PSA testing and more
treatment of early prostate cancer, and I think there is some
statistical evidence that their survival rates are beginning to improve.
I think the same thing has happened in Sweden, where in the 80s
studies seemed to show that early treatment was not superior to watchful
waiting. That biased their attitudes against treatment. But more
recent studies have suggested the opposite, and treatment seems to be
changing with better results.
The place where Giuliani is misleading the public is in the suggestion
that this shows the US has superior medical care to that of other
developed countries. Overall health statistics do not support that
conclusion. Most of the usual criteria show the opposite. The US just
doesn't do very well in this regard, whatever the case for prostate cancer.
Of course, if you compare Giuliani's treatment for prostate cancer with
that available to an average man in the UK, I'm sure his care was
significantly better. But the care of either Giuliani or this typical
Englsihman is much better than that of any US citizen without medical
insurance. If you don't have insurance, you don't get routine PSA
tests, and if you do get prostate cancer, it most likely shows up when
it has already metastasized.
The whole discussion is also misleading in another way. The UK does in
fact have a socialized medical delivery system in that physicians are
salaried. It has not been adequately supported in recent years, and
medical care has declined. The closest US parallel is the VA system,
which has had its ups and downs, depending on how well it has been
supported and administered. VA physicians are also salaried, and the
system by and large fits the definition of a socialized medicine system.
As people repeatedly try to remind us, the US is the only advanced
nation without universal MEDICAL INSURANCE, and that is a different
matter entirely. In the other European countries, and in Canada, there
is a mixture of public and private providers of medical care, much as in
the US, but everyone is covered by insurance.
As far as the US debate is concerned, no US politician is proposing
socializing the medical system. Democrats, by and large, are proposing
making medical insurance universal, and usually by a mixture of public
and private insurance schemes. Clinton, Edwards, Obama, etc., in terms
of what they are proposing for medical insurance, would be considered
right of center in the European context.
None of the leading Republican candidates has proposed universal medical
insurance coverage. On the other hand, Romney, while he was governor of
Massachesetts, together with the state legislature, instituted such a
system, and Schwartzenegger is doing the same in California. (Romney
has since changed his tune on that subject.) I think the candidates are
reluctant to propose anything serious yet because it works better with
the Republican base to castigate Democrats as big government socialists.
But the public seems ready for universal health insurance, so it would
not be surprising if the two parties proposed solutions, which in fact
are not very far apart, in the general election.
Alan Meyer wrote:
> On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
>> ...
>> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
>> survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
>> than in Britain ...
>
> Leaving aside questions about socialized medicine and about Rudi
> Giuliani, I found conflicting evidence about this claim, some of
> which might support Rudi G and some of which might not.
>
> The latest figures I could get were from 2005. The US had around
> 295 million people, and the UK around 60 million people at that
> time.
>
> * info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/mortality/#source1
>
> reports (based on UK Office for National Statistics) that 10,000
> men died of prostate cancer in the UK that year. In the same
> year there were about 30,000 deaths from PCa in the US (see
> Wikipedia, US SEER statistics, etc.)
>
> So the raw rates are:
>
> UK: 10,000 / 60,000,000 = .000166
> US: 30,000 / 295,000,000 = .000107
>
> The US death rate from PCa appears to be substantially lower.
>
> If we look at death rate compared to the number of people
> diagnosed, the US fares even better because more people are
> diagnosed in the US due to the fact that PCa is detected
> earlier here by PSA screening - which is not as often used in
> the UK.
>
> A BBC news article: * news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2077996.stm
> also claims significantly higher survival rates for breast and
> colon cancer in the US as compared to the UK, and says that 58%
> of British patients are diagnosed with PCa in the early stages of
> the disease compared to 70% of patients in the US.
>
> There is some World Health Organization data at:
> * w w w .who.int/entity/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestimates.xls
>
> The latest data I found there was from 2002. It claimed that
> death rates from PCa in the US and UK were 12.1 and 18.6 deaths
> per thousand deaths (I think - if I understand the stats)
> respectively. The numbers are expressed in different terms, but
> the ratios are similar.
>
> On the other hand, I also found a web page claiming the death
> rates were the same, but I can't seem to find it again to get the
> citation.
>
> The issue is more complicated than it seems. In the UK, death
> rates from PCa are very high for men aged 85 and older. It may
> be that age adjusted rates look different from the population
> rates. If more men die from other causes before they reach age
> 85 in the US than in the UK, that might bias the statistics and
> make the UK rate look worse than it really is.
>
> The WHO life expectancies at birth for the two countries in 2005
> are:
> ( * w w w .who.int/whosis/database/life tables/
> life tables process.cfm?path=whosis,life tables&language=english)
>
> UK men: 76.6 years
> US men: 75.3 years
>
>
> But at any rate (forgive the pun) I'm not prepared to say Rudi G
> lied. At the very least, it appears that there is documentary
> support for his view - indicating that, even if it turns out he
> was wrong, he may have had a reasonable belief that he was right.
>
> Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
> for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
> slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
> pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
> least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
> character assassination says more to me about the character of
> the writer than of the person he writes about.
>
> Alan Meyer
> (my real name)
>
There are several factors which affect prostate cancer rates in the US
and the UK. One is that in the US, physicians took up PSA testing in a
big way in the early 90s, while in the UK and some other European
countries, this was not done. Today, even in the US, there is still
debate about whther or not routine PSA testing is justified. I think
the evidence does show it is effective, but in principle this should be
established by a randomized prospective study. There is one such study
going on now and its results may be forthcoming in a few years. That
might clarify the situation somewhat, but it is too much to expect it
will eliminate all doubts. The reason is that it is just very difficult
to conduct such studies for diseases with long time lines.
Recently, UK physicians appear to be doing more PSA testing and more
treatment of early prostate cancer, and I think there is some
statistical evidence that their survival rates are beginning to improve.
I think the same thing has happened in Sweden, where in the 80s
studies seemed to show that early treatment was not superior to watchful
waiting. That biased their attitudes against treatment. But more
recent studies have suggested the opposite, and treatment seems to be
changing with better results.
The place where Giuliani is misleading the public is in the suggestion
that this shows the US has superior medical care to that of other
developed countries. Overall health statistics do not support that
conclusion. Most of the usual criteria show the opposite. The US just
doesn't do very well in this regard, whatever the case for prostate cancer.
Of course, if you compare Giuliani's treatment for prostate cancer with
that available to an average man in the UK, I'm sure his care was
significantly better. But the care of either Giuliani or this typical
Englsihman is much better than that of any US citizen without medical
insurance. If you don't have insurance, you don't get routine PSA
tests, and if you do get prostate cancer, it most likely shows up when
it has already metastasized.
The whole discussion is also misleading in another way. The UK does in
fact have a socialized medical delivery system in that physicians are
salaried. It has not been adequately supported in recent years, and
medical care has declined. The closest US parallel is the VA system,
which has had its ups and downs, depending on how well it has been
supported and administered. VA physicians are also salaried, and the
system by and large fits the definition of a socialized medicine system.
As people repeatedly try to remind us, the US is the only advanced
nation without universal MEDICAL INSURANCE, and that is a different
matter entirely. In the other European countries, and in Canada, there
is a mixture of public and private providers of medical care, much as in
the US, but everyone is covered by insurance.
As far as the US debate is concerned, no US politician is proposing
socializing the medical system. Democrats, by and large, are proposing
making medical insurance universal, and usually by a mixture of public
and private insurance schemes. Clinton, Edwards, Obama, etc., in terms
of what they are proposing for medical insurance, would be considered
right of center in the European context.
None of the leading Republican candidates has proposed universal medical
insurance coverage. On the other hand, Romney, while he was governor of
Massachesetts, together with the state legislature, instituted such a
system, and Schwartzenegger is doing the same in California. (Romney
has since changed his tune on that subject.) I think the candidates are
reluctant to propose anything serious yet because it works better with
the Republican base to castigate Democrats as big government socialists.
But the public seems ready for universal health insurance, so it would
not be surprising if the two parties proposed solutions, which in fact
are not very far apart, in the general election.
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
Leonard Evens wrote:
> Alan Meyer wrote:
>> On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
>>> ...
>>> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
>>> survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
>>> than in Britain ...
How about comparing Giuliani's chances to those of Olmert, who has just
been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Israel has had a single payer
national health insurance system since 1995. Olmert's doctors say he
has a better than 95 percent chance of a complete cure, and his
treatment---radical prostatectomy---won't interfere significantly with
his duties, including upcoming negotiations with the Palestinians. I
doubt if Giuliani can claim to be better off.
Leonard Evens wrote:
> Alan Meyer wrote:
>> On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
>>> ...
>>> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
>>> survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
>>> than in Britain ...
How about comparing Giuliani's chances to those of Olmert, who has just
been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Israel has had a single payer
national health insurance system since 1995. Olmert's doctors say he
has a better than 95 percent chance of a complete cure, and his
treatment---radical prostatectomy---won't interfere significantly with
his duties, including upcoming negotiations with the Palestinians. I
doubt if Giuliani can claim to be better off.
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
Countries where PSA testing is common seem to do better in prostate
cancer survival than countries where it is rare. For example, compare
the US in the 90s to either the UK or Sweden in those years. Or even
compare men in the US with health insurance who have access to testing
to men in the US without health insurance, who don't. The former do
much better in prostate cancer survival than the latter.
Doesn't this "prove" that routine PSA testing should be encouraged and
extended to all men past a certain age?
Unfortunately, the issue is not so simple. Many physicians, including
some influential groups of physicians in the US, don't accept that
conclusion. In fact, practice guidelines in the US often suggest not
that primary care physicians should routinely do PSA testing, but rather
that they should discuss with their patients the risks and benefits of
so doing, and then let them decide.
The reason is the following. If you routinely do PSA testing, you are
going to discover a certain number of cases which, had they never been
discovered, would never have bothered the men involved. Treating those
mens leads to possible adverse side effects, so treatment is not cost
free. Unfortunately, we have no way to know how many such cases there
are. Estimates range all over the map. It seems that it is at least
15 percent and it could be significantly higher, particularly for lower
risk cases such as Gleason 6, T1c, with relatively low PSA. Adding a
large number of benign cases to the diagnosed pool will of course make
the survival statistics look much better.
The problem is that whenever you count, you have to make sure you are
not counting "apples" in one context and "oranges" in another.
In principle, you settle a question like this as follows. You take a
group of men and randomly divide them into two groups, one of which you
do testing on and the other of which you don't. You are careful to make
sure you don't introduce any biases so that one group is different from
the other in a relevant way, except for the testing. You then follow
the men in both groups and see what happens to them.
There is currently such a study going on in the US, and the results
should come out in a few years. There have already been some
preliminary results, which have suggested that yearly testing may not be
necessary for all men, for example.
Will this study settle the question? Unfortunately, again the issue is
not that simple. As Walsh points out in his book, it is not enough
just to do PSA testing. You have to then follow it up with treatment,
and the results may depend significantly on the form of the treatment
and how good the physicians involved are. In addition, you have to
follow all the men in both groups until they are all dead. but that is
very expensive, and not likely to be done. The current study will only
follow them for about 12 years, I believe, and there are no controls on
treatment.
Let me say that I do personally believe that PSA testing is justified,
and that on balance it saves lives. But I can't say that the scientific
evidence has established this beyond all reasonable doubt. I do think
the evidence is strong enough so that all man in the US past 50 (or 40
if they are in certain ethnic groups or have a family history of PC)
should have access to PSA testing and treatment if warranted. If this
makes me a "socialist", then so be it.
Countries where PSA testing is common seem to do better in prostate
cancer survival than countries where it is rare. For example, compare
the US in the 90s to either the UK or Sweden in those years. Or even
compare men in the US with health insurance who have access to testing
to men in the US without health insurance, who don't. The former do
much better in prostate cancer survival than the latter.
Doesn't this "prove" that routine PSA testing should be encouraged and
extended to all men past a certain age?
Unfortunately, the issue is not so simple. Many physicians, including
some influential groups of physicians in the US, don't accept that
conclusion. In fact, practice guidelines in the US often suggest not
that primary care physicians should routinely do PSA testing, but rather
that they should discuss with their patients the risks and benefits of
so doing, and then let them decide.
The reason is the following. If you routinely do PSA testing, you are
going to discover a certain number of cases which, had they never been
discovered, would never have bothered the men involved. Treating those
mens leads to possible adverse side effects, so treatment is not cost
free. Unfortunately, we have no way to know how many such cases there
are. Estimates range all over the map. It seems that it is at least
15 percent and it could be significantly higher, particularly for lower
risk cases such as Gleason 6, T1c, with relatively low PSA. Adding a
large number of benign cases to the diagnosed pool will of course make
the survival statistics look much better.
The problem is that whenever you count, you have to make sure you are
not counting "apples" in one context and "oranges" in another.
In principle, you settle a question like this as follows. You take a
group of men and randomly divide them into two groups, one of which you
do testing on and the other of which you don't. You are careful to make
sure you don't introduce any biases so that one group is different from
the other in a relevant way, except for the testing. You then follow
the men in both groups and see what happens to them.
There is currently such a study going on in the US, and the results
should come out in a few years. There have already been some
preliminary results, which have suggested that yearly testing may not be
necessary for all men, for example.
Will this study settle the question? Unfortunately, again the issue is
not that simple. As Walsh points out in his book, it is not enough
just to do PSA testing. You have to then follow it up with treatment,
and the results may depend significantly on the form of the treatment
and how good the physicians involved are. In addition, you have to
follow all the men in both groups until they are all dead. but that is
very expensive, and not likely to be done. The current study will only
follow them for about 12 years, I believe, and there are no controls on
treatment.
Let me say that I do personally believe that PSA testing is justified,
and that on balance it saves lives. But I can't say that the scientific
evidence has established this beyond all reasonable doubt. I do think
the evidence is strong enough so that all man in the US past 50 (or 40
if they are in certain ethnic groups or have a family history of PC)
should have access to PSA testing and treatment if warranted. If this
makes me a "socialist", then so be it.
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
On Oct 30, 9:07 pm, Leonard Evens <l...@math.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> There are several factors which affect prostate cancer rates in the US
> and the UK. One is that in the US, physicians took up PSA testing in a
> big way in the early 90s, while in the UK and some other European
> countries, this was not done. Today, even in the US, there is still
> debate about whther or not routine PSA testing is justified. I think
> the evidence does show it is effective, but in principle this should be
> established by a randomized prospective study. There is one such study
> going on now and its results may be forthcoming in a few years. That
> might clarify the situation somewhat, but it is too much to expect it
> will eliminate all doubts. The reason is that it is just very difficult
> to conduct such studies for diseases with long time lines.
> ...
Leonard,
You are quite correct. The issues involving the comparison of PC
rates in the US and the UK are quite complicated. An excellent
analysis of this can be read at: * w w w .factcheck.org/a_bogus_cancer_statistic.html
Ed Friedman
On Oct 30, 9:07 pm, Leonard Evens <l...@math.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> There are several factors which affect prostate cancer rates in the US
> and the UK. One is that in the US, physicians took up PSA testing in a
> big way in the early 90s, while in the UK and some other European
> countries, this was not done. Today, even in the US, there is still
> debate about whther or not routine PSA testing is justified. I think
> the evidence does show it is effective, but in principle this should be
> established by a randomized prospective study. There is one such study
> going on now and its results may be forthcoming in a few years. That
> might clarify the situation somewhat, but it is too much to expect it
> will eliminate all doubts. The reason is that it is just very difficult
> to conduct such studies for diseases with long time lines.
> ...
Leonard,
You are quite correct. The issues involving the comparison of PC
rates in the US and the UK are quite complicated. An excellent
analysis of this can be read at: * w w w .factcheck.org/a_bogus_cancer_statistic.html
Ed Friedman
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
Leonard Evens wrote:
> Alan Meyer wrote:
>>
>> Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
>> for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
>> slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
>> pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
>> least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
>> character assassination says more to me about the character of
>> the writer than of the person he writes about.
I strongly suspect you'd change that tune after you have been baselessly
assassinated hundreds of times and over a decade by people stalking you
across the internet and into family and career arenas of your real world
by miscreants from the other side of the political fence. The cowardice
factor, IMO, enters when the assassin does his dirty work without proof
or without valid public good as an established motivation. If public
records proved that A is a child molester or B is funded by the Nazi
Party or C is practicing medicine without a license, what difference
would the real name of the records-poster make?
I.P.'s my name and I'm sticking to it. ;-)
> The place where Giuliani is misleading the public is in the suggestion
> that this shows the US has superior medical care to that of other
> developed countries. Overall health statistics do not support that
> conclusion.
Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
misleading statistics, such as deliberately omitting non-viable preemies
and stillbirths from their infancy survival records. I'd guess similar
fallacies would appear in other statistics with further Googling.
> As far as the US debate is concerned, no US politician is proposing
> socializing the medical system. Democrats, by and large, are proposing
> making medical insurance universal, and usually by a mixture of public
> and private insurance schemes.
That's just semantics. Whether one calls it "socialized medicine" or
"mandatory insurance", forcing everyone to pay into a pool so all have
health coverage is still socialism. If the shoe fits, why are people to
averse to calling it a shoe?
> Clinton, Edwards, Obama, etc., in terms
> of what they are proposing for medical insurance, would be considered
> right of center in the European context.
And of the Chinese, Russian, and Cuban models. Are those benchmarks we
should model our society on?
> But the public seems ready for universal health insurance
Of course. They are being falsely led to believe that 45M people cannot
afford medical insurance or care, that socialized medicine is a panacea,
that the government could manage its way out of a paper bag, and that
forcing Peter to support Paul is a valid way to live or to run a nation.
We're also ready for gasoline prices fixed at $1 a gallon, Britney or
Clooney as governor of California, and global warming legislation, but
that's because of brainwashing, not rational examination of the facts,
and the public costs would exceed comprehension.
I.P.
Leonard Evens wrote:
> Alan Meyer wrote:
>>
>> Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
>> for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
>> slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
>> pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
>> least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
>> character assassination says more to me about the character of
>> the writer than of the person he writes about.
I strongly suspect you'd change that tune after you have been baselessly
assassinated hundreds of times and over a decade by people stalking you
across the internet and into family and career arenas of your real world
by miscreants from the other side of the political fence. The cowardice
factor, IMO, enters when the assassin does his dirty work without proof
or without valid public good as an established motivation. If public
records proved that A is a child molester or B is funded by the Nazi
Party or C is practicing medicine without a license, what difference
would the real name of the records-poster make?
I.P.'s my name and I'm sticking to it. ;-)
> The place where Giuliani is misleading the public is in the suggestion
> that this shows the US has superior medical care to that of other
> developed countries. Overall health statistics do not support that
> conclusion.
Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
misleading statistics, such as deliberately omitting non-viable preemies
and stillbirths from their infancy survival records. I'd guess similar
fallacies would appear in other statistics with further Googling.
> As far as the US debate is concerned, no US politician is proposing
> socializing the medical system. Democrats, by and large, are proposing
> making medical insurance universal, and usually by a mixture of public
> and private insurance schemes.
That's just semantics. Whether one calls it "socialized medicine" or
"mandatory insurance", forcing everyone to pay into a pool so all have
health coverage is still socialism. If the shoe fits, why are people to
averse to calling it a shoe?
> Clinton, Edwards, Obama, etc., in terms
> of what they are proposing for medical insurance, would be considered
> right of center in the European context.
And of the Chinese, Russian, and Cuban models. Are those benchmarks we
should model our society on?
> But the public seems ready for universal health insurance
Of course. They are being falsely led to believe that 45M people cannot
afford medical insurance or care, that socialized medicine is a panacea,
that the government could manage its way out of a paper bag, and that
forcing Peter to support Paul is a valid way to live or to run a nation.
We're also ready for gasoline prices fixed at $1 a gallon, Britney or
Clooney as governor of California, and global warming legislation, but
that's because of brainwashing, not rational examination of the facts,
and the public costs would exceed comprehension.
I.P.
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
> Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
> misleading statistics,
I see you have joined Giuliani's lies yourself.
> Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
> misleading statistics,
I see you have joined Giuliani's lies yourself.
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
George Conklin wrote:
>> Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
>> misleading statistics,
>
> I see you have joined Giuliani's lies yourself.
>
>
>
George,
I'm curious. You neglected to indicate who posted this or what the
context was. Just what is your position on this subject?
George Conklin wrote:
>> Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
>> misleading statistics,
>
> I see you have joined Giuliani's lies yourself.
>
>
>
George,
I'm curious. You neglected to indicate who posted this or what the
context was. Just what is your position on this subject?
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
"George Conklin" <nil@earthlink . net > wrote in message
news:13imtgts41gb5bd@corp.supernews . com ...
>
> > Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
> > misleading statistics,
>
> I see you have joined Giuliani's lies yourself.
>
>
>
The comment was the usual AMA rant which I have seen in newspapers back
to the late 1950s. It is always used to justify whatever is done here, and
to make fun of the rest of the entire world for not paying their MDs more
money. As for results, various articles pointed out how this is done for
prostate cancer statistics and how they are posted.
"George Conklin" <nil@earthlink . net > wrote in message
news:13imtgts41gb5bd@corp.supernews . com ...
>
> > Don't forget that many other nations use very different and thus often
> > misleading statistics,
>
> I see you have joined Giuliani's lies yourself.
>
>
>
The comment was the usual AMA rant which I have seen in newspapers back
to the late 1950s. It is always used to justify whatever is done here, and
to make fun of the rest of the entire world for not paying their MDs more
money. As for results, various articles pointed out how this is done for
prostate cancer statistics and how they are posted.
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
On Oct 30, 9:48 pm, Alan Meyer <amey...@yahoo . com > wrote:
> On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
>
> > ...
> > OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
> > survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
> > than in Britain ...
>
> Leaving aside questions about socialized medicine and about Rudi
> Giuliani, I found conflicting evidence about this claim, some of
> which might support Rudi G and some of which might not.
>
> The latest figures I could get were from 2005. The US had around
> 295 million people, and the UK around 60 million people at that
> time.
>
> * info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/mortality...
>
> reports (based on UK Office for National Statistics) that 10,000
> men died of prostate cancer in the UK that year. In the same
> year there were about 30,000 deaths from PCa in the US (see
> Wikipedia, US SEER statistics, etc.)
>
> So the raw rates are:
>
> UK: 10,000 / 60,000,000 =3D .000166
> US: 30,000 / 295,000,000 =3D .000107
>
> The US death rate from PCa appears to be substantially lower.
>
> If we look at death rate compared to the number of people
> diagnosed, the US fares even better because more people are
> diagnosed in the US due to the fact that PCa is detected
> earlier here by PSA screening - which is not as often used in
> the UK.
>
> A BBC news article: * news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2077996.stm
> also claims significantly higher survival rates for breast and
> colon cancer in the US as compared to the UK, and says that 58%
> of British patients are diagnosed with PCa in the early stages of
> the disease compared to 70% of patients in the US.
>
> There is some World Health Organization data at: * w w w .who.int/entity=
/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestima...
>
> The latest data I found there was from 2002. It claimed that
> death rates from PCa in the US and UK were 12.1 and 18.6 deaths
> per thousand deaths (I think - if I understand the stats)
> respectively. The numbers are expressed in different terms, but
> the ratios are similar.
>
> On the other hand, I also found a web page claiming the death
> rates were the same, but I can't seem to find it again to get the
> citation.
>
> The issue is more complicated than it seems. In the UK, death
> rates from PCa are very high for men aged 85 and older. It may
> be that age adjusted rates look different from the population
> rates. If more men die from other causes before they reach age
> 85 in the US than in the UK, that might bias the statistics and
> make the UK rate look worse than it really is.
>
> The WHO life expectancies at birth for the two countries in 2005
> are:
> ( * w w w .who.int/whosis/database/life_tables/
> life_tables_process.cfm?path=3Dwhosis,life_tables&language=3Denglish)
>
> UK men: 76.6 years
> US men: 75.3 years
>
> But at any rate (forgive the pun) I'm not prepared to say Rudi G
> lied. At the very least, it appears that there is documentary
> support for his view - indicating that, even if it turns out he
> was wrong, he may have had a reasonable belief that he was right.
>
> Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
> for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
> slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
> pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
> least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
> character assassination says more to me about the character of
> the writer than of the person he writes about.
>
> Alan Meyer
> (my real name)
May I suggest the use age-adjusted MALE prostate death rates? The
deaths/diagnosed ratio also gives us useful information.
Gl=E1ucio Soares
On Oct 30, 9:48 pm, Alan Meyer <amey...@yahoo . com > wrote:
> On Oct 30, 4:47 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once . net > wrote:
>
> > ...
> > OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the
> > survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America
> > than in Britain ...
>
> Leaving aside questions about socialized medicine and about Rudi
> Giuliani, I found conflicting evidence about this claim, some of
> which might support Rudi G and some of which might not.
>
> The latest figures I could get were from 2005. The US had around
> 295 million people, and the UK around 60 million people at that
> time.
>
> * info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/mortality...
>
> reports (based on UK Office for National Statistics) that 10,000
> men died of prostate cancer in the UK that year. In the same
> year there were about 30,000 deaths from PCa in the US (see
> Wikipedia, US SEER statistics, etc.)
>
> So the raw rates are:
>
> UK: 10,000 / 60,000,000 =3D .000166
> US: 30,000 / 295,000,000 =3D .000107
>
> The US death rate from PCa appears to be substantially lower.
>
> If we look at death rate compared to the number of people
> diagnosed, the US fares even better because more people are
> diagnosed in the US due to the fact that PCa is detected
> earlier here by PSA screening - which is not as often used in
> the UK.
>
> A BBC news article: * news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2077996.stm
> also claims significantly higher survival rates for breast and
> colon cancer in the US as compared to the UK, and says that 58%
> of British patients are diagnosed with PCa in the early stages of
> the disease compared to 70% of patients in the US.
>
> There is some World Health Organization data at: * w w w .who.int/entity=
/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestima...
>
> The latest data I found there was from 2002. It claimed that
> death rates from PCa in the US and UK were 12.1 and 18.6 deaths
> per thousand deaths (I think - if I understand the stats)
> respectively. The numbers are expressed in different terms, but
> the ratios are similar.
>
> On the other hand, I also found a web page claiming the death
> rates were the same, but I can't seem to find it again to get the
> citation.
>
> The issue is more complicated than it seems. In the UK, death
> rates from PCa are very high for men aged 85 and older. It may
> be that age adjusted rates look different from the population
> rates. If more men die from other causes before they reach age
> 85 in the US than in the UK, that might bias the statistics and
> make the UK rate look worse than it really is.
>
> The WHO life expectancies at birth for the two countries in 2005
> are:
> ( * w w w .who.int/whosis/database/life_tables/
> life_tables_process.cfm?path=3Dwhosis,life_tables&language=3Denglish)
>
> UK men: 76.6 years
> US men: 75.3 years
>
> But at any rate (forgive the pun) I'm not prepared to say Rudi G
> lied. At the very least, it appears that there is documentary
> support for his view - indicating that, even if it turns out he
> was wrong, he may have had a reasonable belief that he was right.
>
> Finally, although I'm a Democrat myself and am unlikely to vote
> for Rudi G., I find it unconscionable for people to make public
> slurs against other people's characters while hiding behind
> pseudonyms. If you think that Rudi G. lied, then you should at
> least have the courage to say so under your own name. Anonymous
> character assassination says more to me about the character of
> the writer than of the person he writes about.
>
> Alan Meyer
> (my real name)
May I suggest the use age-adjusted MALE prostate death rates? The
deaths/diagnosed ratio also gives us useful information.
Gl=E1ucio Soares
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
"Freedom Fighter" <liberty@once . net > wrote in message
news:IDNVi.37051$kj1.22199@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att . net ...
> The Liar Strikes Again!
> By: Steve Benen on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
> * w w w .crooksandliars . com /2007/10/30/the-serial-exaggerator-strikes-again/
>
> Rudy Giuliani, whose record for jaw-dropping exaggerations is unmatched,
> apparently just can't help himself.
>
.......way way too long for me to read...... As I suggesed, just vote for
Hillary and be done with your Rudy bashing.
--
JK Sinrod
w w w .SinrodStudios . com
w w w .MyConeyIslandMemories . com
"Freedom Fighter" <liberty@once . net > wrote in message
news:IDNVi.37051$kj1.22199@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att . net ...
> The Liar Strikes Again!
> By: Steve Benen on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
> * w w w .crooksandliars . com /2007/10/30/the-serial-exaggerator-strikes-again/
>
> Rudy Giuliani, whose record for jaw-dropping exaggerations is unmatched,
> apparently just can't help himself.
>
.......way way too long for me to read...... As I suggesed, just vote for
Hillary and be done with your Rudy bashing.
--
JK Sinrod
w w w .SinrodStudios . com
w w w .MyConeyIslandMemories . com
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
Your messages are political, US political to boot, this is a breast cancer
support group. Have you guys no respect?
As we say her in the UK can you please, PLEASE, bog off?
Marķa
"Freedom Fighter" <liberty@once . net > wrote in message
news:IDNVi.37051$kj1.22199@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att . net ...
> The Liar Strikes Again!
> By: Steve Benen on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
> * w w w .crooksandliars . com /2007/10/30/the-serial-exaggerator-strikes-again/
>
> Rudy Giuliani, whose record for jaw-dropping exaggerations is unmatched,
> apparently just can't help himself.
>
> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the survival rate
> from prostate cancer is much higher in America than in Britain, thus
> supposedly proving the failure of socialized medicine.
>
> The problem is that his claim is just plain FALSE. In fact, mortality
> rates from prostate cancer are almost the same in America and Britain.
>
> So, will this get as much attention as, say, the Edwards haircut or the
> Hillary laugh? Will it get any coverage at all? Bear in mind that health
> care is a central domestic issue of this election - and Rudy has just
> showed that he doesn't know a thing about it.
>
> A Washington Post reporter recently suggested political reporters will get
> around to scrutinizing Giuliani's whoppers at some point in the future.
> Now seems like a perfectly good time, doesn't it?
>
> -------------------------
> AMERICA'S MARTINET: The DANGEROUS Candidacy of Rudy Giuliani
>
> The mass media sometimes calls him "America's mayor." Critics label him a
> dangerous fascist. Whether he's the alleged hero who "took charge" on
> September 11, 2001, or the frightening face of a new American Reich, it
> appears Rudolph Giuliani will carry George W. Bush's torch into the 2008
> presidential election.
>
> When Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
> national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
> of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
> mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
> terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
>
> Before picking up the "hero" moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in
> the city he governed as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug.
> These accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former
> New York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
> Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
> any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
> why the First Amendment is so important." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
> courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
> American freedom twenty-seven times!
>
> More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his
> administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely,
> First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on
> doing the one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids:
> using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of
> government itself."
>
> Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case
> of Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a
> dictator and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police
> state. Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not
> by street cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying
> his art at political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All
> were false arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.
>
> In a similar fashion and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
> Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
> public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only
> good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response
> to criticism thus often proves it was highly justified.
>
> According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post,
> now New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
> saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
> sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
> the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."
>
> Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from
> Giuliani's totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would
> improve the "quality of life" in New York by punishing trivial violations
> such as jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and
> panhandling, and even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent
> expressions of free speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed
> and dragged off to jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front
> stoops - the New York City equivalent of hanging out on the porch.
> Marijuana possession arrests increased by well over 4,000 percent.
> Arrests were even made for such things as riding a bike without a bell on
> it and sitting on milk crates on the sidewalk.
>
> Giuliani's courtship of rogue police officers and seduction of the NYPD to
> become his personal Gestapo began in September 1992, when he addressed an
> angry rally of cops protesting then-mayor Dinkins's proposal for a
> civilian board to review police misconduct.
>
> It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty cops
> drank heavily (a violation for which, under Giuliani, many citizens would
> later be arrested), and a few waved signs like "Dump the Washroom
> Attendant," a racist reference to mayor Dinkins. Twice, Giuliani called
> the Dinkins proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered, and Giuliani was
> jubilant. "Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot," Mr. Dinkins
> stated.
>
> As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were
> blatant. For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the
> Asian-American community for their New Years celebration, a religious and
> cultural tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined
> Chinatown streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even
> refused to allow a permit for a professionally supervised display. The
> Christian equivalent of this would be banning Christmas trees and
> decorations because they occasionally start fires. Giuliani never
> relented on this. On the Jewish festival of Purim however, when fireworks
> are used in the streets of Jewish neighborhoods, the police continued to
> look the other way! They also ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood
> streets to destroy leavened bread before Passover. Can you imagine the
> police response to this in any poor, Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American
> community? Giuliani's lasting legacy is that in New York fireworks are OK
> on Purim, but celebrate the 4th of July with them and you can get busted.
> So much for "Independence" Day.
>
> Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
> strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
> the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance
> policy as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of
> fighting crime, Giuliani had thus transformed the NYPD into his own
> private Gestapo, going as far as assigning two NYPD detectives, at
> taxpayer expense, as round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This
> after his closing down all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"
>
> Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
> Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
> Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a
> "rogue operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi."
> Fashion-wise, the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military
> death squads, wearing "We Own the Night" t-shirts, and shirts citing
> Ernest Hemingway's "There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote -
> quite a variation from standard issue uniforms!
>
> This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent
> African immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet
> after being ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the
> streets to protest the unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that
> people were protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."
>
> Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
> brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
> took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe
> sadistically shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the
> same object into his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized
> with serious injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these
> sadists said to him "This is Giuliani time!"
>
> When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
> is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
> later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
> alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner.
>
> Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during
> his tenure, but he just happened to be in the right place at the right
> time to take credit for this. During this period crime dropped similarly
> nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
> methods.
>
> Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
> units in the police department. When plainclothes cops asked a black man
> on the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took
> offense to being called a drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the
> unidentified officers, who then SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a
> knee-jerk defense of the killer cops, telling the press that Dorismond was
> "no altar boy." Salon . com pointed out that in fact he WAS an altar boy!
> Desperate to justify the killing, Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of
> Dorismond's sealed juvenile record - for disorderly conduct! It seems
> that under Giuliani, this justifies the death penalty. Giuliani's
> contribution to Dorismond's funeral was a squadron of police in full riot
> gear, inciting violence that would not have occurred without their
> unnecessary and disrespectful presence.
>
> Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani, stated:
> "There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity - He was
> barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race." Giuliani's
> vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor, Mayor Bloomberg:
> "You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani administration],
> everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race" -
> quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair magazine.
>
> By the time his ship came in on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's approval
> rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, had hit a Bush-like 37
> percent. Hizzoner got downright weird, proposing a Taliban-style "decency
> panel," operated out of his office, that would have the power to determine
> what would be considered "art" in New York City. This came after the
> debacle of Giuliani's failed attempt to cut public funding for the
> Brooklyn Museum because he considered art on exhibit there to be
> offensive. He also began having nightclubs lacking a cabaret license
> raided by the police for allowing patrons to dance. And early in 2001 he
> ordered a city-wide ban on pet ferrets, claiming there was something
> "deranged" about opponents of the ban, and that "excessive concern with
> little weasels is a sickness."
>
> In desperation to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani seized upon
> any and every opportunity to appear the "hero." Despite demanding a
> crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and reported in the
> press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
> newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.
>
> Giuliani's perhaps most criminally negligent if not malevolent pretense to
> heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
> mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
> dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as
> an impending disaster, and came on like a knight in shining armor with a
> solution. His solution was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has
> caused and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11
> assurances that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had the
> entire city repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic
> insecticide, and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety
> precautions in doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to
> prove in such environmental poisoning cases than when the police are
> ordered to falsely arrest someone, or tacitly encouraged to brutally beat
> suspects or shoot them to death.
>
> Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead or dying therefrom,
> former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground
> Zero workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts,
> and also that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned
> with its image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the
> wake of the subsequent anthrax scare.
>
> Jerome Hauer was the city's emergency management director from 1996 to
> 2000, and is recognized as a leading expert on biological and chemical
> terrorism. "Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am
> speaking now," Mr Hauer told London's The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a
> control freak who micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational
> character trait and picks fights just to score points. He's the last thing
> this country needs as president." Mr Hauer also accused Mr Giuliani of
> failing to sort out turf battles between the city's police and fire
> departments, and of appointing inexperienced cronies to key positions.
>
> Pet ferrets weren't the only ones to get the boot in Giuliani's New York.
> Hizzoner boasted of moving people from welfare to workfare, where
> thousands of people earned less than two dollars per hour replacing an
> equivalent number of parks department employees whose positions were
> downsized. During this period, 13,000 welfare-dependent City University
> students were FORCED TO LEAVE COLLEGE and enter the menial workfare force,
> where less than six percent of participants transition to real employment
> paying minimum wage or more. In this we see Giuliani's cruel rewarding of
> riches and punishing poverty, as if wealth and poverty were not inherently
> rewarding and punishing conditions.
>
> Mega-real estate developer Donald Trump described Giuliani as "maybe the
> best [mayor] ever," obviously meaning the most profitable for him.
> However, Ralph Nader called him "the oligarch's mayor." Giuliani took
> credit for a high-end real estate boom while presiding over double-digit
> rises in homelessness, cutting public spending on affordable housing by
> nearly half and housing for the homeless by nearly thr
Your messages are political, US political to boot, this is a breast cancer
support group. Have you guys no respect?
As we say her in the UK can you please, PLEASE, bog off?
Marķa
"Freedom Fighter" <liberty@once . net > wrote in message
news:IDNVi.37051$kj1.22199@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att . net ...
> The Liar Strikes Again!
> By: Steve Benen on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
> * w w w .crooksandliars . com /2007/10/30/the-serial-exaggerator-strikes-again/
>
> Rudy Giuliani, whose record for jaw-dropping exaggerations is unmatched,
> apparently just can't help himself.
>
> OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the survival rate
> from prostate cancer is much higher in America than in Britain, thus
> supposedly proving the failure of socialized medicine.
>
> The problem is that his claim is just plain FALSE. In fact, mortality
> rates from prostate cancer are almost the same in America and Britain.
>
> So, will this get as much attention as, say, the Edwards haircut or the
> Hillary laugh? Will it get any coverage at all? Bear in mind that health
> care is a central domestic issue of this election - and Rudy has just
> showed that he doesn't know a thing about it.
>
> A Washington Post reporter recently suggested political reporters will get
> around to scrutinizing Giuliani's whoppers at some point in the future.
> Now seems like a perfectly good time, doesn't it?
>
> -------------------------
> AMERICA'S MARTINET: The DANGEROUS Candidacy of Rudy Giuliani
>
> The mass media sometimes calls him "America's mayor." Critics label him a
> dangerous fascist. Whether he's the alleged hero who "took charge" on
> September 11, 2001, or the frightening face of a new American Reich, it
> appears Rudolph Giuliani will carry George W. Bush's torch into the 2008
> presidential election.
>
> When Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
> national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
> of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
> mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
> terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
>
> Before picking up the "hero" moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in
> the city he governed as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug.
> These accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former
> New York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
> Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
> any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
> why the First Amendment is so important." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
> courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
> American freedom twenty-seven times!
>
> More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his
> administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely,
> First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on
> doing the one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids:
> using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of
> government itself."
>
> Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case
> of Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a
> dictator and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police
> state. Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not
> by street cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying
> his art at political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All
> were false arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.
>
> In a similar fashion and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
> Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
> public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only
> good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response
> to criticism thus often proves it was highly justified.
>
> According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post,
> now New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
> saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
> sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
> the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."
>
> Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from
> Giuliani's totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would
> improve the "quality of life" in New York by punishing trivial violations
> such as jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and
> panhandling, and even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent
> expressions of free speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed
> and dragged off to jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front
> stoops - the New York City equivalent of hanging out on the porch.
> Marijuana possession arrests increased by well over 4,000 percent.
> Arrests were even made for such things as riding a bike without a bell on
> it and sitting on milk crates on the sidewalk.
>
> Giuliani's courtship of rogue police officers and seduction of the NYPD to
> become his personal Gestapo began in September 1992, when he addressed an
> angry rally of cops protesting then-mayor Dinkins's proposal for a
> civilian board to review police misconduct.
>
> It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty cops
> drank heavily (a violation for which, under Giuliani, many citizens would
> later be arrested), and a few waved signs like "Dump the Washroom
> Attendant," a racist reference to mayor Dinkins. Twice, Giuliani called
> the Dinkins proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered, and Giuliani was
> jubilant. "Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot," Mr. Dinkins
> stated.
>
> As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were
> blatant. For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the
> Asian-American community for their New Years celebration, a religious and
> cultural tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined
> Chinatown streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even
> refused to allow a permit for a professionally supervised display. The
> Christian equivalent of this would be banning Christmas trees and
> decorations because they occasionally start fires. Giuliani never
> relented on this. On the Jewish festival of Purim however, when fireworks
> are used in the streets of Jewish neighborhoods, the police continued to
> look the other way! They also ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood
> streets to destroy leavened bread before Passover. Can you imagine the
> police response to this in any poor, Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American
> community? Giuliani's lasting legacy is that in New York fireworks are OK
> on Purim, but celebrate the 4th of July with them and you can get busted.
> So much for "Independence" Day.
>
> Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
> strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
> the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance
> policy as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of
> fighting crime, Giuliani had thus transformed the NYPD into his own
> private Gestapo, going as far as assigning two NYPD detectives, at
> taxpayer expense, as round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This
> after his closing down all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"
>
> Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
> Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
> Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a
> "rogue operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi."
> Fashion-wise, the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military
> death squads, wearing "We Own the Night" t-shirts, and shirts citing
> Ernest Hemingway's "There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote -
> quite a variation from standard issue uniforms!
>
> This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent
> African immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet
> after being ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the
> streets to protest the unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that
> people were protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."
>
> Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
> brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
> took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe
> sadistically shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the
> same object into his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized
> with serious injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these
> sadists said to him "This is Giuliani time!"
>
> When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
> is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
> later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
> alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner.
>
> Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during
> his tenure, but he just happened to be in the right place at the right
> time to take credit for this. During this period crime dropped similarly
> nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
> methods.
>
> Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
> units in the police department. When plainclothes cops asked a black man
> on the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took
> offense to being called a drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the
> unidentified officers, who then SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a
> knee-jerk defense of the killer cops, telling the press that Dorismond was
> "no altar boy." Salon . com pointed out that in fact he WAS an altar boy!
> Desperate to justify the killing, Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of
> Dorismond's sealed juvenile record - for disorderly conduct! It seems
> that under Giuliani, this justifies the death penalty. Giuliani's
> contribution to Dorismond's funeral was a squadron of police in full riot
> gear, inciting violence that would not have occurred without their
> unnecessary and disrespectful presence.
>
> Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani, stated:
> "There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity - He was
> barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race." Giuliani's
> vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor, Mayor Bloomberg:
> "You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani administration],
> everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race" -
> quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair magazine.
>
> By the time his ship came in on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's approval
> rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, had hit a Bush-like 37
> percent. Hizzoner got downright weird, proposing a Taliban-style "decency
> panel," operated out of his office, that would have the power to determine
> what would be considered "art" in New York City. This came after the
> debacle of Giuliani's failed attempt to cut public funding for the
> Brooklyn Museum because he considered art on exhibit there to be
> offensive. He also began having nightclubs lacking a cabaret license
> raided by the police for allowing patrons to dance. And early in 2001 he
> ordered a city-wide ban on pet ferrets, claiming there was something
> "deranged" about opponents of the ban, and that "excessive concern with
> little weasels is a sickness."
>
> In desperation to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani seized upon
> any and every opportunity to appear the "hero." Despite demanding a
> crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and reported in the
> press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
> newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.
>
> Giuliani's perhaps most criminally negligent if not malevolent pretense to
> heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
> mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
> dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as
> an impending disaster, and came on like a knight in shining armor with a
> solution. His solution was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has
> caused and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11
> assurances that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had the
> entire city repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic
> insecticide, and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety
> precautions in doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to
> prove in such environmental poisoning cases than when the police are
> ordered to falsely arrest someone, or tacitly encouraged to brutally beat
> suspects or shoot them to death.
>
> Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead or dying therefrom,
> former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground
> Zero workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts,
> and also that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned
> with its image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the
> wake of the subsequent anthrax scare.
>
> Jerome Hauer was the city's emergency management director from 1996 to
> 2000, and is recognized as a leading expert on biological and chemical
> terrorism. "Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am
> speaking now," Mr Hauer told London's The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a
> control freak who micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational
> character trait and picks fights just to score points. He's the last thing
> this country needs as president." Mr Hauer also accused Mr Giuliani of
> failing to sort out turf battles between the city's police and fire
> departments, and of appointing inexperienced cronies to key positions.
>
> Pet ferrets weren't the only ones to get the boot in Giuliani's New York.
> Hizzoner boasted of moving people from welfare to workfare, where
> thousands of people earned less than two dollars per hour replacing an
> equivalent number of parks department employees whose positions were
> downsized. During this period, 13,000 welfare-dependent City University
> students were FORCED TO LEAVE COLLEGE and enter the menial workfare force,
> where less than six percent of participants transition to real employment
> paying minimum wage or more. In this we see Giuliani's cruel rewarding of
> riches and punishing poverty, as if wealth and poverty were not inherently
> rewarding and punishing conditions.
>
> Mega-real estate developer Donald Trump described Giuliani as "maybe the
> best [mayor] ever," obviously meaning the most profitable for him.
> However, Ralph Nader called him "the oligarch's mayor." Giuliani took
> credit for a high-end real estate boom while presiding over double-digit
> rises in homelessness, cutting public spending on affordable housing by
> nearly half and housing for the homeless by nearly thr
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
"Marķa" <noemail@xyznothing.me.uk> wrote in message
news:AfCdna7X49106bXaRVnytAA@bt . com ...
> Your messages are political, US political to boot, this is a breast cancer
> support group. Have you guys no respect?
>
> As we say her in the UK can you please, PLEASE, bog off?
>
> Marķa
Well, while I sympathise with your first two sentences I'd like to point out
that we don't all say bog off in Britain. I've never said it and can't
remember anyone else saying it either.
Nor do I think it will be effective. Silence is the best put down.
Mary
"Marķa" <noemail@xyznothing.me.uk> wrote in message
news:AfCdna7X49106bXaRVnytAA@bt . com ...
> Your messages are political, US political to boot, this is a breast cancer
> support group. Have you guys no respect?
>
> As we say her in the UK can you please, PLEASE, bog off?
>
> Marķa
Well, while I sympathise with your first two sentences I'd like to point out
that we don't all say bog off in Britain. I've never said it and can't
remember anyone else saying it either.
Nor do I think it will be effective. Silence is the best put down.
Mary
Re: Another GIULIANI LIE - about CANCER this time!
Holly Political Crap,
This is just a guess, but I'd say Mr. FF is bias.
Rich
Holly Political Crap,
This is just a guess, but I'd say Mr. FF is bias.
Rich
