Senator goes face to face with dissent

Senator Arlen Specter left with his security detail after a town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pa.



I give Specter credit for little, but give him great credit for doing this: facing loud-mouths, allowing people to voice their opinions, and trying to conduct a town-hall meeting despite raucous disruptions.







Many said the Obama administration’s plans for a new health care system were just another example of a federal government that had again gone too far, just as it had, they said, with the economic stimulus, the auto industry bailout and the cap-and-trade program.

What if the government hadn't intervened? What if it allowed the recession to deepen, allowed the car industry to implode and be taken over by foreign firms?

“This is about the dismantling of this country,” Katy Abram, 35, shouted at Mr. Specter, drawing one of the most prolonged rounds of applause. “We don’t want this country to turn into Russia.”

Russia is a capitalist nation. Autocratic, but capitalist.

Ms. Abram described herself as a stay-at-home mother from Lebanon, and in many ways she was representative of the almost entirely white and irritable crowd, most of whom were from the area. Based on interviews with several dozen people who attended, it appeared that about 80 percent of those who showed up opposed the planned changes to the health care system.

Does she cling to her guns? White and irritable.

Anger at a Town Hall Meeting

This guy condemned Senator Specter, and told him God would judge him in due time. What that has t do with health care reform perhaps only he knows.

It was the angriest people who got in line first.

And their anger, while intense, is not representative of general public sentiment.

The crowd was largely hostile to Mr. Specter, who was repeatedly booed and heckled as topics like health care, immigration, government spending and the cap-and-trade program to control pollution were brought up. Many also expressed broad if unspecified disdain for the government and for President Obama.

Broad if unspecified disdain for government and the President: well, if they had the nerve to be politically incorrect rather than just angry, they might say the word black, the one they wish they could, but will not, say.


most of those who spoke Tuesday seemed unlikely to vote in the Democratic primary. Many seemed concerned about issues that are either not in the health care legislation or are peripheral to the debate in Washington — abortion, euthanasia, coverage of immigrants, privacy.

Abortion is not part of the health care bills being offered, and euthanasia is not part of any bill up for consideration: it is a word bandied about as a scare tactic to rile people. Immigrants? A flase target.

“It says plainly right there they want to limit the type of care elderly can get,” said Laurel Tobias, an office manager from Lebanon, referring to a bill in the House. “They are talking about killing people.”

Survivor of Nazi brutality ascended Wall Street

Andrew Lanyi: 1925-2009









In a Hungarian accent so thick that some of his clients could barely understand his recommendations, Mr. Lanyi dispensed pearls of wisdom that became part of his legend.

He listed a dozen of his favorites in his 1992 memoir, "Confessions of a Stockbroker." Among them: "The only people who sell at the highs and buy at the lows are liars." And then there was his sure-fire deal-closer: "You and I want to swim the English Channel, let's put our toe in the water."




Mr. Lanyi's immersion extended to holding most of the stocks he recommended, something that many Wall Street firms have tried to avoid by separating brokerage and analysis. But to Mr. Lanyi, owning what he recommended was proof of his credibility.

What he did was an old-fashioned custom of putting your money where your mouth is; what big firms did was to pump up stocks of firms they did business with in order to benefit underhandedly. Separating brokerage and analysis was a sham, when both functions were performed by the same firm.

"What everyone knows isn't worth knowing," he often said, attributing the quote to journalist Walter Lippmann.

A native of Budapest, Mr. Lanyi was enslaved during World War II to help the Germans build airports and other facilities for the Wehrmacht. "It was vastly better than being locked into a concentration camp," he wrote in his memoir. He crossed the border into Austria during the 1956 Soviet crackdown in Hungary, and managed to make it to the United States.

For his funeral, an announcement read in part: "Guests are encouraged to wear primary colors or bright clothing in memory of Andrew's colorful style of dressing."

U.S. Births Reach Record Level

The new numbers indicate the nation is experiencing a baby boomlet with fertility rates higher in every racial group. On average, a U.S. woman has 2.1 babies in her lifetime. The highest fertility rates were among Hispanics.

Associated Press

ATLANTA -- More babies were born in the U.S. in 2007 than any year in the nation's history, topping the peak during the baby boom 50 years earlier, federal researchers reported Wednesday.

There is both good and bad news from the more than 4.3 million births: The U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend. However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.

The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40%, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.

For a variety of reasons, it's become more acceptable for women to have babies without a husband, said Duke University's S. Philip Morgan, a leading fertility researcher.

Even happy couples may be living together without getting married, experts say. And more women -- especially those in their 30s and 40s -- are choosing to have children despite their single status.

The new numbers indicate the nation is experiencing a baby boomlet with fertility rates higher in every racial group. On average, a U.S. woman has 2.1 babies in her lifetime. The highest fertility rates were among Hispanics.

But it's not clear the boomlet will last long. Some experts think birth rates are already declining because of the economic recession that began in late 2007.

"I expect they'll go back down. The lowest birth rates recorded in the United States occurred during the Great Depression -- and that was before modern contraception," said Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health.

The 2007 statistical snapshot reflected a relatively good economy coupled with cultural trends that promoted childbirth, she and others noted.

Meanwhile, U.S. abortions have been dropping to their lowest levels in decades, according to other reports. Some have attributed the abortion decline to better use of contraceptives, but other experts have wondered if the rise in births might indicate a failure in proper use of contraceptives. Some earlier studies have shown declining availability of abortions.

Cultural attitudes may be a more likely explanation. Mr. Morgan noted the pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the unmarried teen daughter of former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The young woman had a baby boy in December, and plans for a wedding with the father, Levi Johnston, were scrapped.

"She's the poster child for what you do when you get pregnant now," Mr. Morgan said.

Teen women tend to follow what their older sisters do, so perhaps it's not surprising that teen births are going up just like births to older women, said Sarah Brown, the chief executive for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Indeed, it's harder to understand why teen births had been declining for about 15 years before the recent uptick, she said. It may have been due to a concentrated societal effort to reduce teen births in the 1990s that has waned in recent years, she said.

The statistics are based on a review of most 2007 birth certificates by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The numbers also showed:

-Cesarean section deliveries continue to rise, now accounting for almost a third of all births. Health officials say that rate is much higher than is medically necessary. About 34% of births to black women were by C-section, more than any other racial group. But geographically, the percentages were highest in Puerto Rico, at 49%, and New Jersey, at 38%.

-The pre-term birth rate, for infants delivered at less than 37 weeks of pregnancy, declined slightly. It had been generally increasing since the early 1980s. Experts said they aren't sure why it went down.

-Among the states, Utah continued to have the highest birth rate and Vermont the lowest.

CDC officials noted that despite the record number of births, this is nothing like what occurred in the 1950s, when a much smaller population of women were having nearly four children each, on average. That baby boom quickly transformed society, affecting everything from school construction to consumer culture.

Today, U.S. women are averaging 2.1 children each. That's the highest level it's been since the early 1970s, but is a relatively small increase from the rate it had hovered at for more than 10 years and is hardly transforming.

"It's the tiniest of baby booms," said Mr. Morgan in agreement. "This is not an earthquake; it's a slight tremor."

An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants

In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own. Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

His conscience made him break out from the shell of impartiality.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

And the legal system seems in a hurry to criminalize these people. Illegal? Undocumented, yes. Yet all they want to do is work, and will take jobs no one else will take.

Libraries multiply offer of dailies to attract immigrants

A library article from newspaper (online version) La Vanguardia, Barcelona.

Seguir leyendo noticia

"a prensa extranjera "ha sido una forma de enganche, de que vinieran". No es de extrañar, pues, que el centro ofrezca la posibilidad de leer diarios en urdu, bengalí, hindi, árabe, francés, italiano e inglés, además de en catalán y castellano. Y dentro del castellano, se puede leer prensa de diferentes países de habla hispana, como Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina o Chile."

"Acorde con el cambio que ha vivido la sociedad catalana en los últimos años -en 2006 más de un 12% de la población de la provincia era extranjera- las bibliotecas se adaptan a sus nuevos usuarios."