Big badass slumgullion #33

Blog posts and news reports all mixed together... slumgullion-like:

The Gray Panthers of San Fransisco blogs about managed care and assisted-suicide:

...The California Association of Physicians Groups, an organization that represents Northern and Southern California Permanente Groups and lobbies for “groups practicing in the managed care model” (http://www.CAPG.org), have recently come out with letters to the Legislature and press statements strongly advocating for assisted suicide in California.

Will assisted suicide proponents finally admit that a quick hundred dollar lethal prescription is vastly cheaper than offering extended care over the long haul?

Diebold sues Massachusetts for selecting a competitors voting machines over theirs. Judge denies Diebold's request to block bid. --Via Sara

Merge of schools for blind and deaf students opposed in Oregon. Also in Ohio. I've been following the controversy about this on a listserv, but Stephen Kuusisto of Planet of the Blind weighs in here.

In the NYT: Trafficker of Healer? And Who's the Victim? -- On pain treatment

From NPR, artist Lisa Bufano finds creative inspiration for dance in being a double amputee. Video of some dance segments also available at the NPR link. Visual description of photo at left by Gehard Aba: Caption from NPR "This 2005 piece, Fancy, was commissioned by the University of Linz. In it, Bufano wears stilts fashioned from red, Queen Anne-style table legs."

Also from NPR, the Healing Waters Project, which provides fishing as a therapy for wounded war vets.

At Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac (I know, but the poem he presents is somebody else's, not by his bigoted self) -- "How to Tell If You're a Participant or a Staff (A Handy Guide for Day Programs)" by David Moreau

Diary of a Goldfish on "As no questions, hear no lies" -- Goldfish weighs in on strangers' questions about impairments.

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan and Michael A. Devita (whom I don't know anything about) write about a transplant surgeon being investigated for "hasten[ing] the death of a 26-year-old patient in order to harvest his organs more quickly to ensure they would be transplantable."

On how the relay phone service for the deaf is used by con artists and the people hired to do the relay cannot legally interfere:

Operators vary in their estimates of scamming prevalence, but most agree that con artists chew up roughly a third to half of their workload, at times even more. Because of confidentiality rules set down by the FCC, relay companies say they can't monitor or estimate the number of abuse calls.

"If we did just legit calls, our office would be closed. The managers tell me, 'if it weren't for those calls, you wouldn't have a paycheck,' " says one operator in New Castle, Pa., who wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job. She has worked at an AT&T relay center for more than a decade and is putting her children through college on her wages.

At TomPaine.com, "Cutting Native People's Health Care":

American Indians have access to federally-paid health care based on hundreds of treaties the United States signed with Indian nations, under the accepted federal practice of more than 100 years and as a requirement of the trust responsibility the U.S. owes the Indian nations to care for their welfare. Indians have not, however, received their fair share of federal health care, especially in light of this heightened duty. In fact, a July 18, 2003 study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights entitled “A Quiet Crisis” found that

... the federal government’s rate of spending on health care for Native Americans is 50 percent less than for prisoners or Medicaid recipients, and 60 percent less than is spent annually on health care for the average American.

Clearly, the United States is not fulfilling its treaty and trustee responsibility to provide health care to American Indian people.

From the NYT: "Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?" -- On auditory hallucinations

From The New York Review of Books: "A Track All His Own" -- On "outsider" artist Martín Ramírez. The image just above, created in 1954, is a drawing by the artist of a horse and rider in profile, with both the horse and some lines drawn around them in box-like progression to create an illusion of depth in shades of purple. The rider seems to be wearing chainmail and I find the drawing reminiscent of ancient Greek drawings on pottery and murals. The horse has one front leg kicked up high. More on the artist and his history as a schizophrenic and immigrant from Mexico here and here.

Simi Linton at Disability Culture Watch offers a heads-up that next week's Law & Order: Criminal Intent on NBC Tuesday evening will feature some Deaf actors:

I know that they hired many Deaf actors and that their process (of development, casting and production) was extraordinary.

From The Stranger, an anonymous column on the Iraq war and disability fetishism:

And thanks to George W. Bush—and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and corrupt Republicans and ineffectual Democrats—there are going to be a lot more amputees around for me to see as sexual beings. During the Vietnam War, two American soldiers were wounded for every fatality. Now, thanks to advances in body armor and battlefield medicine, 16 U.S. soldiers are wounded for every fatality. That means fewer depressing military funerals and more sexy disabled vets, more Bryan Andersons and Marissa Strocks.

From the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, and article about local Muslims trying to balance culture and faith. Among several other conflicts, some devout Muslim taxi drivers refuse to transport people with service dogs:

Airport commissioners have expressed concern about cabbies refusing to pick up fares because of Islamic prohibitions against carrying alcohol. They also worry that Islamic rules about dogs might prompt drivers to decline rides when 300 visitors with guide dogs attend the American Council of the Blind convention in Minneapolis this summer.

Abdinoor Ahmed Dolal, a Muslim cab driver from Kenya, was stunned by the commissioners' concerns. The Qur'an places high value on assisting the disabled, he said. So Dolal says Muslim cabbies have offered to give blind conventioneers free rides to Minneapolis, forgoing the $30 fares as a sign of good will.

"The issues we have are so simple and have nothing to do with extremism or fanaticism," Dolal said. "We are Muslims and we are Minnesotans and if we sit down and listen to each other, we can work things out."

The cover story of the latest Weekly Standard: "Identity Politics Gone Wild: The Deaf Culture Wars at Gallaudet University" -- The tone of this conservative piece seems partly to be that taxpayers don't need to pay for this school, but it's also very critical of Deaf culture as an identity.