Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina & other: August 2008

Monday 25 August 2008

Calif. AG, Family Planning Advocates Say Proposed HHS Rule Would Overturn State Birth Control Law

�California Attorney General Jerry Brown (D) and some family planning advocates on Wednesday said that a draft HHS regulation would prohibit the state from enforcing the state law requiring insurance coverage for birth control to women, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, 8/21). Also on Wednesday, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and MoveOn.org Political Action submitted a petition with more than 325,000 signatures urgency HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt to pull back the draft rule from consideration, ABC News reports (Barrett, ABC News, 8/20).

According to the Chronicle, the administration drafted the proposal to implement laws prohibiting recipients of federal cash in hand from penalizing health practitioners who reject to perform abortions or provide abortion referrals (San Francisco Chronicle, 8/21). At the news conference announcing the request, Ellen Golombek, PPAF vice president of external affairs, said the draft regulation "would allow providers to withhold critical health upkeep information without telling their patients." According to ABC News, other advocates illustrious that the draft "muddies the line between miscarriage and contraception, and look at it an opening for health attention providers to more oftentimes refuse to prescribe birth control and other forms of contraception and point of accumulation women's health care options" (ABC News, 8/20).

The leaked draft principle defines abortion as "whatsoever of the various procedures -- including the prescription and governance of whatever drug or the performance of whatever procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of the life sentence of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after nidation" - a definition of abortion that could include many forms of hormonal contraception and intrauterine devices. (Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 8/11).

Brown in an Aug. 4 letter to Leavitt wrote, "By financially punishing noncompliant states with the personnel casualty of (federal) funding, the regulation would intrude on the government agency of states to reenact and enforce laws that ensure women's access to birth control." California's practice of law, which was passed in 2000 and upheld by the state Supreme Court in 2004, was passed in response to the decision by some indemnity companies to cover male infertility drugs but not oral contraception for women. The legal philosophy exempts church building employees, just the land Supreme Court ruled that the criterion applies to the 52,000 employees of Catholic hospitals and 1,600 employees of Catholic Charities.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Catholic Charities on the California opinion and a similar ruling by the New York Supreme Court. Twenty-five states have torah similar to California's measure, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

If the draft HHS regulation is enacted, it would be a "monster step down a road that volition potentially leave women with a major loss of access to contraceptive methods," Kathy Kneer, CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, aforementioned. She added that opponents of the rule volition continue spur members of Congress and federal officials to plosive it from being issued, adding that if they fail they will inquire the succeeding president to repeal the rule (San Francisco Chronicle, 8/21).

Leavitt in an Aug. 7 web log entry said he has ordered the draft regulation to be rewritten with a narrow focus on allowing health care workers to refuse to participate in procedures they receive objectionable. He also aforementioned that HHS is "still contemplating if it will issue a regulation or not. If it does, it testament be direct focused on the shelter of practitioner conscience." However, Leavitt did not say what he meant by "practitioner sense of right and wrong" or the extent to which the protection would allow health care workers to refuse services (Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 8/11).

David Stevens, CEO of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, said many of the group's 15,000 members have been denied jobs or promotions for refusing to perform abortions or prescribe contraceptives that they believe ar the eq of abortion. "There is an organized effort to force health care professionals to do things that violate their conscience," Stevens said. According to the Chronicle, the proposed ruler is backed by some other religious organizations opposed to abortion, and it is opposed by the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and cl members of Congress, including Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) (San Francisco Chronicle, 8/21).

Reprinted with tolerant permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women's Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women's Health Policy Report is a free service of the National Partnership for Women & Families, published by The Advisory Board Company.

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Friday 15 August 2008

Blobtown: Movie memories revitalize a community

PHOENIXVILLE, Pa. �

There is a man. He carries a can, and inside it is a weird, cerise hunk of goo the size and consistency of a generous bowl of lumpy raspberry Jell-O.

Each summertime, man and can climb into the car and drive to a lowly town on the edge of the Philadelphia suburbs, not far from where Washington played out that bitter, long-ago wintertime in Valley Forge.

The town, Phoenixville, is a plaza of history, too. Fifty years agone, this position was affected by the spotlight. A small production company deuce towns over made a film that no one expected to go anywhere. Instead, it became one of the iconic sci-fi horror flicks of the 1950s and introduced the world to an thespian named Steve McQueen.

In the movie, this happens: A mysterious lump of extraterrestrial gelatin kills a doctor in his home, menaces teenagers in a grocery store, surges toward a crowd of people in a darkened theater and engulfs a diner.

In tangible life, this happens: Each summer, hundreds of locals and folk from as far out as Oregon and Jamaica come to the center of Phoenixville. They visit the house where the doctor "died," stop by the strip mall where the market once stood, eat at the dining compartment on the site where the outlander met its frozen final stage. And, on Phoenixville's main drag, on a warm summer evening, more than 400 of them carry screaming from the like theater, the Colonial, in a joyous re-enactment of the movie's big scene.

The man and the can play starring roles in The Big Weekend and its ocean of science fiction fans and weekend excursioneers. The adult male is Wes Shank, aggregator of picture show memorabilia. The can contains his piece de resistance, the matter that gave rise to all the commotion in the first-class honours degree place.

It is a toy film airplane propeller, nothing more, a clump of silicone polymer manufactured by Union Carbide in West Virginia. But it is also the centerpiece of a story of tourism and entertainment that, a half-century and six manned moon landings later, refuses to go away.

All around the hunk of guck, something unmated unfolds: Because a picture was made long ago, because a town's gotta do what a town's gotta do, a fete has risen. A downtown has amount back. A past has been leveraged - a fictional past, but a past nevertheless.

Once, in 1958, "The Blob" came from beyond the stars and brought expiry to Phoenixville. Today, scarce as out of the blue, it is bringing life.

---

"When you see something that was on film, it takes you into the movie. It's almost care you are a character," says Dave Perillo, an artist from Swarthmore, Pa. He has come to hawk his sci-fi caricatures at "Blobfest," Phoenixville's name for its annual street-fair excursion into the blobosphere.

"These places," Perillo says, "are our fresh historic sites for the ADD generation."

Entertainment can be an unpredictable beast. What appears up on the big screen - some of it, at least - was created in real places. And sometimes, because of the fabrication, those real places begin to change.

In Scotland, an ancient rook has turn a pilgrimage site because part of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was filmed there. In Dyersville, Iowa, the baseball game diamond carven from cornfields for "Field of Dreams" draws fans who consider it a real ballpark. Mount Airy, N.C., has taken nisus to work itself feel like Mayberry, the quintessential small ithiel Town from "The Andy Griffith Show." And the browning automatic rifle exterior from "Cheers," erstwhile called the Bull and Finch, has renamed itself; these days, it's "Cheers Beacon Hill."

We live in a ground of big stories, in an years where amusement trumps most everything. So events like Blobfest become natural leisure options at a meter when towns need to stand out, to become on-site motif parks and draw tourer dollars.

And here in the cradle of American independence, where real world history is everywhere, why shouldn't fictional history turn something tangible?

"History, the Liberty Bell, the significance of it gets lost of me," says Ellen Plummer of Portland, Maine. "This," she says, "is more real."

She is walking up Bridge Street in Phoenixville with her boyfriend, Rick Naratil, a native world Health Organization moved away years agone. He remembers, at 5, seeing "The Blob" on TV and thinking, hey - that's the field where I watch Disney movies.

While the diner and other motion-picture photography locations draw gawkers during Blobfest, the Colonial Theater is the epicenter of all things blob. Inside, sci-fi flicks play to enthusiastic audiences, and people at the edges of fame like Kris Yeaworth, son of "Blob" theater director Shorty Yeaworth, discuss the intricacies of filming the movie originally titled "The Molten Meteor."

Outside, the blobbery takes on as many forms as creativity and entrepreneurial apprehension allow.

There is the wooden blob cutout that allows you to poke your head through a gob and make believe you're being swallowed by its spiritual maw. There are the actual fervor truck and the 1950 Ford coupe that McQueen drove in the motion-picture show. Outside the pizza parlour opposite the theater, the proprietors consume created their own creamy, oozy garden pink mass, confined to a garbage bank identification number for the moment.

And there is the parade, lED by a 203% surprisingly, and ironically, authentic.

Modeling one's self after film tin be briary; real history can get lost. But it's hard to find a downside in Phoenixville. The sir Ernst Boris Chain of custody is pretty basic. Theater came punt. Community leveraged blob. Business resurged. Downtown got safer. Everybody's happy.

Even now, almost a decennary into Blobfest, a bemusement remains around the enthusiasm generated by the alien-visitation tale filmed the summertime before Sputnik was launched.

"I take the ride. But do I get it? No," Foote acknowledges. "The volunteers wHO work all year, half of them don't beget it. They say, `Why do they come?'"

Karin Williams, who does PR for the Phoenixville Chamber of Commerce, echoes many along Bridge Street when she assesses the whole occasion: A biotic community identifiable by something strictly pop-cultural isn't a bad thing amid the static of the 21st century.

"It puts our little