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NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg s plan to ban purchase of soda with foodstamps frowned upon by U.S., ‘gotta keep them fat and happy'

Federal officials on Friday rejected Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s proposal to bar New York City’s food stamp users from buying soda and other sugary drinks with them.

The decision derailed one of the mayor’s big ideas to fight obesity and poor nutrition in the city. Mr. Bloomberg and the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, were quick to criticize the ruling by theUnited States Department of Agriculture as a disservice to low-income residents.

Dr. Farley, who said he was “very upset” by the decision, said that it “ really calls into question how serious the U.S.D.A. is about addressing the nation’s most serious nutritional problem.”

In October, city and state officials proposed a two-year experiment to see if the prohibition would reduce obesity among people who buy their groceries with food stamps. Dr. Farley said that about 57 percent of adults in the city and 40 percent of the children in its public schools were overweight or obese, and that obesity was especially rampant in low-income neighborhoods. Limiting consumption of sodas and other drinks with high sugar content, he argued, could help reverse that trend.

But in a letter to a New York State official, an administrator of the food stamp program in Washington said the city’s proposed experiment would have been “too large and complex” to implement and evaluate.

The city’s proposal was part of Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign to make the city a healthier place, which has included banning smoking indoors and in public parks, barring restaurants from cooking with trans fats and requiring them to inform customers about calorie counts. The mayor was not pleased with the rejection.

“We think our innovative pilot would have done more to protect people from the crippling effects of preventable illnesses like diabetes and obesity than anything else being proposed elsewhere in this country — and at little or no cost to taxpayers,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement. “We’re disappointed that the federal government didn’t agree, and sorry that families and children may suffer from their unwillingness to explore our proposal. New York City will continue to pursue new and unconventional ways to combat the health problems that hurt New Yorkers and Americans from coast to coast.”

The disappointment of Mr. Bloomberg and Dr. Farley was matched by the thrill in the voice of Joel Berg, the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who cheered the federal government for “deciding not to micromanage” the lives of poor people.

“The whole attempt was misguided and unworkable,” Mr. Berg said. “This proposal was based on the false assumption that poor people were somehow ignorant or culturally deficient.”more from NYTimes

New in NYC Classes: "Babies Don't Belong in Dumpsters 101?"

After two young moms recently abandoned their newborn babies -- one of whom did not survive -- New York officials are proposing that high school curriculum include lessons on what mothers can do if they give birth to a baby they don't want.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, State Sen. Eric Adams and State Assemblyman Hakim Jeffries are proposing state legislation requiring the change to high school health curriculum.

The officials envision students being taught in public school about so-called "safe haven laws," which allow a parent to leave a newborn anonymously without prosecution as long as the newborn is abandoned in a safe way.more

View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.thank you Chris

While I think the acts of these two black women is criminal I also don't think that schools should be the place to broadcast this, what happened to the parents.  I think both should be charged with a crime and the mother sterlized.    While doing a little research on the story that was submitted I was surprised to learn where the idea came from and it just might surprise you too.

Japan, not without some controversy, has joined a growing list of countries offering so-called "baby drops" -- safe havens where parents can anonymously drop off their unwanted infants.

The Catholic-run Jikei Hospital on the island of Kumamoto, 550 miles southwest of Tokyo, has just been given permission to install what hospital administrators call the "Cradle of the White Stork."  

The "stork's cradle" is a small incubator bed accessible through a small window in the hospital wall. An alarm bell rings within minutes after a baby is anonymously left in the incubator, signaling nurses to retrieve the infant.

The idea is patterned after programs in Italy as well as Germany's "baby box," initiated by a Christian organization in Hamburg in 2000. Today, more than 90 such drop-offs are located throughout Germany.
"We want to save both the children and the mothers," Jikei Hospital director Taiji Hasuda told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. "The children are not the ones responsible for their birth."


The plan came about after a series of high-profile cases in which parents reportedly abandoned newborn babies in parks, shopping centers, supermarkets and even in bicycle baskets.  

Baby safe havens are in wide use in the United States, although rather than windows, states with the program often let parents leave babies at police stations or hospitals with no questions asked.

In Europe, the drop-off windows have names like "babyklappe" (baby slot) in Austria and Germany; "babyfenster" (baby window) in Switzerland; "babybox" in the Czech Republic; and "culle per vite" (cradles for life) in Italy.more from abc

Communists Rally in Favor of Ground Zero Mosque In NYC

“All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet ‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened,’ they have begun to get somewhat rotten…. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”
–Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program
These were the counter protesters who showed up to defend the Ground Zero Mosque during today’s rally in Manhattan…Note the name written in red on the bottom of their signs, “Internationalist Group”
From their website:
Welcome! The Internationalist Group, section of the League for the Fourth International, fights for international socialist revolution, the conquest of power by the working class, led by its Leninist party, championing the cause of all the oppressed. After a decade and a half in which the ruling class trumpeted the supposed “death of communism,” the imperialists are bogged down in losing wars of colonial occupation in the Near East while a global economic crisis shakes the foundations of the capitalist order. With mass unemployment, poverty and hunger ravaging the planet, once again there is talk of socialism and revolution. But as in the past, the key question is that of forging a vanguard to lead the struggle of the workers and the oppressed.

We say that communism lives in the struggles of the working class and the program of its vanguard. What is dead is not communism, but Stalinism. Stalin’s anti-Marxist dogma of “socialism in one country” was the ideology of a conservative nationalist bureaucracy that grew out of the isolation of the Soviet workers state. Stalinism betrayed the October Revolution, undermining its historic achievements and ultimately preparing the way for capitalist counterrevolution under the relentless pressure of imperialism.more