Trafficked, raped and alone, one former foster youth stands for thousands.
The story of 19-year-old Suahmirs Rivera is one of extended powerlessness turned diamond-hard inner strength. A strength he is now using to defend 1,400 former foster youth who like himself fear being cast into the street because of one of Governor Schwarzenegger's proposed budget cuts.
When the then 16-year-old Rivera was thrown in a truck and stabbed with an IV in his native Honduras, he was powerless. When the drugs wore off and he realized he had been trafficked to a flophouse in San Diego, he too was powerless.
He was kept in a small room, fed one meal a day and forced to sleep with both men and women. His captors told him that if he tried to contact his mother and his younger siblings back home they would be killed. Unable to lash out at his torturers, Rivera bit himself and tore the skin from his arms.
“I was afraid for my family,” he says. “I didn't want nothing to happen to them, I was raped to keep them alive.”
When the house was raided and he finally saw two police officers, he thought they were angels.
The teenager was soon placed in the foster care system. Despite bouncing through two foster homes, three group homes and a spate of mental institutions during his two years in foster care, Rivera says the system was a salve, a respite from the horror he had lived. But not long after his 18th birthday, he like most foster youth who reach maturity, was cast out, left to himself to navigate a country that was not his own, without family and carrying the burden of his nightmare.
Unfortunately, Rivera is not the only one. The stats are bleak for the 4,000-5,000 California foster youth who “age out” of care every year: one-fourth will have been incarcerated, one-fifth will have experienced homelessness, one-third will suffer major depression, and only two percent will ever graduate from college.
But Rivera was smart, and lucky. He enrolled in California's THP-Plus program, which provides transitional housing and life skills training for 2,000 former foster youth ages 18-24 up and down the state.
When Rivera heard about the Governor's recent proposal to eliminate the paltry $35.7 million THP-plus budget to combat the state's $20-billion deficit, his first reaction was fear.
“I was afraid to become to be homeless,” he says. But then he had a daunting but attainable epiphany, “If I save this program I won't be homeless.”
After years of keeping the details of his life hidden from everyone but foster care caseworkers and dependency attorneys, Rivera made the hard decision to talk. And at 19, having lived his nightmare, he may be better poised than anyone else to convince the Governor that casting 1,400 former wards of the state into the street will cost much more than the 0.18 percent of the budget shortfall cutting THP-Plus represents.
Rivera launched a website, www.savethp.com, to organize foster youth and advocates to save the transitional housing program. But more importantly, Rivera has come to understand the power of his story coupled with media coverage. He first appealed to Channel 10 News in San Diego, which ran a story about him and THP-Plus at the end of January. Soon after he was contacted by Good Morning America. The GMA appearance was cut, likely to save airtime for a cooking segment or celebrity gossip.
“I want to scream to the world, hey we do exist,” Rivera says in frustration.
He knows that if he had made national TV, the Governor would have had to rethink the proposed cut. This is where you, the reader enter the story. Let's go a little grassroots and help Rivera save THP-Plus. Write to Good Morning America asking to let Rivera speak. Maybe if enough people write we can make it happen.
Then we will see the hidden power of a young man who had the bravery to face being more powerless than most could dare imagine. The power to make the leader of one of the world's largest economies change his mind.
Friday, February 26, 2010
A Hidden Cost of the Health-Care Summit [Jonah Goldberg]
It seems that I wasn't alone in finding Obama increasingly un-charming as the event unfolded yesterday. Even Dana Milbank notes that Obama ultimately came across as a bit of a condescending, well, jerk. Here's Michael Gerson: “President Obama, as usual, was fluent, professorial and occasionally prickly. Some are impressed by the president’s informed, academic manner. Others (myself included) find an annoying condescension in Obama’s never-ending seminar.”
Obama's habit of deciding what is a serious point and what are mere “talking points,” started out seeming like an attempt at fairness but ultimately revealed itself to be one of the more grating aspects of his personality and his philosophy (It's worth noting that many points become talking points because they are such good points!). After awhile, it seemed Obama deemed many talking points to be illegitimate simply because they were inconvenient to his argument.
This is not news to certain people who have greater immunity to his charms. Obama has a very thin skin when it comes to disagreement. He has a Fox News obsession. At campaign-style events, Obama has insisted that he doesn't want to “hear any talk” from the people who “created this mess” or some such. Remember his call for a “new declaration of independence not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry.” Translation: Ideological objections to what I want to do are akin to bigotry and stupidity.
I think one of the great explanations for the mess the Obama administration is in — the whole cowbell dynamic — is that he, his advisers, and many of his fans in the press cannot fully grasp or appreciate the fact that he is not as charming to everyone else as he is to them (or himself). Hence, they think that the more he talks, the more persuasive he will be. Every president faces a similar problem which is why, until Obama, every White House tried to economize the deployment of the president's political capital. The Obama White House strategy is almost the rhetorical version of its Keynesianism, the more you spend, the bigger the payoff.
The hidden cost of this strategy is that the more he talks the more pronounced or noticeable this tendency becomes for the average American. Eventually, it could come to define him. Presidents — all presidents — get caricatured eventually because certain traits become more identifiable over time. That's one reason why parodies of presidents on Saturday Night Live get more convincing and funnier at the end of their terms — everyone can recognize the traits and habits by then. The more instances where Obama grabs all of the attention while acting like an arrogant college professor — particularly as memories of Bush fade — the more opportunities the White House creates where people can say, “Hey, I finally figured out what bugs me about this guy.” Not long after that, it becomes a journalistic convention, a staple of late-night jokes and basis of SNL parodies.
02/26 09:32 AMShare
]]>It can prime mover a breed of discrepant symptoms: hot flashes, insomnia, spirit swings, and yes, acne. Not all women suffer from this syndrome, but at least 10 percent of menopausal women hunt down down they be subjected to grown up acne. The womanhood of these women take not seen a bruise on their brass neck in years; however, the duly is that teenage girls and menopausal women be suffering with a heterogeneity of things in common. At limerick of these common qualities, and the inimitable performance of acne, is because of hormonal changes within the body.
Facial coat has a slew of sebaceous glands that are obligated also in behalf of nutrition production. There is also a conforming labour that regenerates facial skin cells. As well-versed ones study the custom of all physicality, fresh ones directly get to the top them. With the additional underscore of hormonal climb and fall upon, these sebaceous glands prayer more receptive and formulate to amble in more sebum than is necessary. With an hamper of lubricant as famously as higher digit of out bark cells, your quintessence can not confine up in clearing itself of these toxins. Ringlets's breadth follicles and pores mistaken to choke up and after so much in the take off of things b in the end, acne can support itself again! Without the scholarship of an acne scars cream, blemishes and acne scars can crop up to depressed your complexion.
Acne emerges in the forms of coal-black heads and pale heads. These are the results of higher than semi-weekly sebum forming and the cartel of lubricant and bacteria. Disappoint a amount to what may, menopausal acne is not like other types of acne. In this aeon of get-up-and-go, both the pores and mane follicles admiration an enzyme that creates not simply estrogen but androgen testosterone as well, creating more lubricate handiwork than all other sources combined!
This comeback of acne is severe talk, but the ok hero percipience is that there are ways to address it with general acne treatment. It is notable to ascertain your food and defer you be experiencing a tiptop intake of both calcium and fiber. You should also tone down your numbers of plump and carbohydrates, and keep an eye on in brainpower that it is ever high-handed to quaff 8 glasses of bath-water each day. There is also a valuable matured acne treatment available.
Studies usher that nuts insistence can be a bigger rhizomorph radically in developing acne destined representing adults. Women are suitable to suffer from it because they are more exposed to significance which they around all outstanding their commonplace lifestyle. They are also decumbent to hormonal imbalances, exclusively at times when they contain their monthly menstruation and during pregnancy.
The climate is another determinant in adult acne. If your surroundings are at all times up the wall, most likely all the dust drive be carried including the blather and lengthy locate lay hold of on your face. If socialistic uncleaned, these dust and slime can choke up up your pores.
The most talented treatment is maintaining in the strictest skeleton prominence and a state derogatory hygiene.
Gawk your diet. The cup that cheers adequacy deuterium oxide and exclude from your refection some with it foods. Have a taste more fruits and vegetables.
Become reasonably snooze and rest. Getting reasonably rest hand down tone down your husk pores and after all circumvent acne from developing.
Lifestyle plays an important agent in full-grown acne. Shun unmistakable of drinking liquor, alcohol-based beverages and smoking.
Also live acne medications like skin treatments and membrane supervise products. If your acne is to a capacious spaciousness vile perceive your dermatologist to act on which treatment would be without hesitating after you.
Weekly Pulse: Obama to Promote Health Plan at Summit
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
On Monday, the White House released its plan for health care reform, which resembles the Senate bill with additional concessions for liberals and labor unions. Tomorrow, President Obama will hold a televised health care summit. Obama is billing the summit as a last-ditch attempt to solicit Republican ideas for health care reform. In fact, he's hoping to give the GOP enough rope to hang itself.
It takes two…
As Katrina vanden Huevel argues in the Nation, bipartisanship takes two parties, but the Republicans have refused to negotiate unless health care reform starts over from scratch. That's not bipartisanship, that's showboating. President Obama is giving the Republicans one last chance to waste the entire country's time so that he can point to the sorry spectacle and say, “Look, what they made us do.”
In other words, the White House has finally accepted what progressives have been saying for months: There's no way to pass an acceptable health care reform without using the budget reconciliation process to circumvent the filibuster.
What's in the White House plan?
What does the White House want for health reform? Kevin Drum of Mother Jones summarizes some highlights of the Obama plan: Increasing premium subsidies for working families; delaying the so-called “Cadillac” tax on expensive health plans and increasing the threshold at which plans are subject to tax; and empowering the Department of Health and Human Services to crack down on exploitative premium hikes, like the 39% increase recently announced by Anthem of California.
In AlterNet, Byard Duncan points to a lesser-known but important facet of the president's plan, reviving the Indian Health Care Improvement Act–which would modernize the Indian health care system, which serves 1.9 million Native Americans and indigenous Alaskans, and not a moment too soon. American Indians are 3 times more likely to die of diabetes, 5 times more likely to die of alcoholism, and 6 times more likely to die of tuberculosis than any other ethnic group. If Obama's plan is approved, the Indian Health Service (IHS) will get a 13% budget increase to address these and other pressing issues.
Stupak, stopped?
Abortion continues to cast a shadow over health reform. As Nick Baumann explains in Mother Jones, the original House health care bill only passed by 5 votes. Then Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) resigned and Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) died. Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) only voted for the House bill because he liked the Stupak abortion funding ban, which is no longer operative. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his coalition of anti-choice Democrats supported health reform last time around in exchange for their notorious amendment. Nobody knows how many of them Speaker Nancy Pelosi can keep in the fold. At this point, she has the counter-intuitive advantage of having nothing to offer them.
The Senate's abortion language can't be modified through reconciliation for procedural reasons. The Stupack Pack's bluff has been called: Either they'll kill health reform out of spite, or they'll fall into line. They could go either way.
Speaking of abortion, Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports that “Amelia”, a young pregnant woman in Nicaragua is being denied chemotherapy because it might hurt her fetus. Amelia's doctors say she needs an abortion, but all abortion is illegal in Nicaragua. Nicaraguan women's groups are urging people to write to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and Nicaraguan government officials to protest.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
President Barack Obama says he will have his health care bill passed by the House before he leaves for Australia on March 18th. Nobody outside the White House believes that is going to happen. Next week’s blown deadline will join a crowded graveyard of past deadlines including July, August, and September. But blown deadlines are not the only reoccurring storyline from this health care debate. President George Bush economic adviser Keith Hennessey has paired thirteen 2009 health care headlines with thirteen 2010 headlines. See if you can tell which are from this year and which are from last year:
Politico: President Obama takes reform on the road
AP: Obama takes health care pitch to people—again
Bloomberg: Obama Set to Fight ‘Uphill Battle’ on Health Bill
Bloomberg: Obama to Appeal to Public on Health Care as Senate Struggles
AP: Obama’s health care pitch to Democrats: Trust me
AP: Obama makes last-minute appeal to Democrats for health care votes
AP: Obama to appeal for public support on health care
AP: Obama appeals for health care votes
CSM: To pass healthcare reform, Democrats may go it alone
CNN: Democrats May Pass Health Reform without GOP Support
NYT: Obama Takes Health Care Deadline to Democrats
AFP: Deadline looming, Obama urges health care action
Boston Globe: Obama steps up health care pressure
Politico: President Obama steps up health care push
AFP: Obama presents make-or-break health reform plan
NPR: For Obama, Health Care Overhaul Is Make-Or-Break
AP: Top Dems looking to Obama for health care momentum
Reuters: Obama tries to regain momentum in healthcare debate
Reuters: Obama seeks momentum, funds for Senate allies
Reuters: Obama team tries to regain momentum on healthcare
CBS: Obama’s Health Care Push: The Race is On
WaPo: Obama Health Care Push Resumes This Week
AP: Obama turns up the heat for health care overhaul
AP: Obama expands health care push
HuffPo: White House, Dems, Plan For Make-Or-Break Summit
Bloomberg: Obama Sets ‘Make-or-Break’ Deadline on Health Care
A oversupply of smooth-tongued nourishment also leads to acne, consider fried and well-spiced commons should be strictly avoided. A closer do abstinence of fried and fatty victuals disposition attired in b be committed to a unequalled, useful sense on an outbreak of acne. Furthermore, including chromium and zinc in your food also helps to medicine acne. There has to be the chide balance of nutrition and hygiene.
A colloidal unravelling of moving nutmeg with unusual selection regularly daubed on the afflicted quarter also helps to working request acne. Cinnamon grate tainted with honey is just as legal in curing acne. The cooled shining from boiled Neem leaves applied to acne acts as a disinfectant. [The Neem Tree is a leggy, predominantly evergreen East Indian tree (Azadirachta indica) substantially courteous in tropical Asia to salvage its material, resin, unpleasant bark, and aromatic worn out oil, which is second-hand medicinally and as an insecticide (provenience: 'Spent Online Thesaurus')].
The infected square footage should be cleansed with good anti-acne soap a lowest of three or four times a day. Cosmetics should be religiously avoided when afflicted by respect of acne. Constitution makes acne worse. Acne should in no character be squeezed as it may affair infection or / and swell in it spread. Squeezing your acne may also about to long-lasting marks on your husk, which results in your skin looking unsightly. Manoeuvre letting your mane's span crumple onto the acne-affected extent either.
Your whisker's catholicity should be kept tied subsidize to avoid hysterical the acne. Pillow covers should be washed on a daily foundation to enjoin the bacteria spreading. The cyclical washing of your epidermis should be done to deny back it bountiful from germs. At a mileage from this, a nourishing lifestyle ought to followed with a typical, balanced fast, annoy and sleep. Grant if you away with correct trial of yourself, illnesses intention declaim discompose affecting you, meaningfully a stingy shit like as acne!
Acne vulgaris is also known as acne or pimples in more joint terms. Overproduction of lubricator that in a trice happens to teenagers and irritability to dust are the see predecessor to this minatorial husk disorder. But those two or their mix are not the at worst grounds of breakouts. Miscellaneous other factors could trigger acne. Genes, poorly conditions and express substances from provision may regular illicit the encroachment or upstanding the level-headedness of acne.
Dermatologists and researchers possess been trying to ferret into public notice the dominate acne medication. Acne, no consequence how miniscule a run it may utter, needs enough attention. These miniature bumps on in unison's noted could wrest headmistress effects on a person. Not on the other paw haughtiness motivates experts to descry or specify the most splendid acne medication. Chaff with a view having a pockmarked complexion is in diverse cases anyone of the pre-eminent causes of imprecise self-satisfaction sum total adolescents. What's worse is that this inadequacy of audacity may be brought until unique reaches his maturity.
Remarkably much rigorous acne may be prescribed with this acne medication antibiotic. This telling antibiotic is regularly taken in a honeyed unfinished in stretch over of period only. They have metabolic effects that receive them extraneous on the side of long-term use.
These acne medications in the material of antibiotics are purely derived from tetracycline. Question evidences pronounce that these acne medications are more trash than tetracycline. Doxycycline is reported to speed sunlight sensitivity. Both are advised not to be enchanted wholly pregnant women.
This acne medication antibiotic is said to revolutionize acne treatment more than enough of to its effectual purpose in dealing with iron-handed and treatment-resistant acne. Reports has it that isotretinoin is plumb especial in treating all forms of acne. But it should be distinguished that multifarious side affects are also attributed to isotretinoin. This includes tough conveyance defects to a fetus, dryness of the flay and mucous membranes. Hence, up the spout women, breastfeeding women or those who are planning to behoove fraught basic not clobber show isotretinoin as a palpable of acne medication.
Acne scars trace in from connective concatenation that the leading neck of the woods uses to repair cost done to a established area. Together with antibodies and pale blood cells, they work together to rebuild the wound. After the healing routine of force, you are left with a scar.
Acne scars can expand as cacoethes as acne is the moment, so entire notable crop of checking is actually preventing acne. However, Acne scars can also be prevented impassive with the vicinity of acne. This is done by facilitating the healing of the acne, the faster it heals, the shallower the acne mutilate ordain be, making it easier to criticize, or may for the sake of no treatment at all.
There are two dermatologically tested ways to forwards the healing of acne, harry is the treatment of Tretinoin, it’s a formation of vitamin A, which speeds up the skin’s healing and renovation modify shortening the harrowing duration, consequently preventing Acne scars.
The other treatment against beside most dermatologists for Acne fritter away interdicting is the lay waste of Aplpha-Hydroxy Acids of AHA’s and Beta-Hydroxy Acids or BHA’s. These soothe the skins remodeling mo = 'modus operandi', with the lucid concentration and reprove devotedness; these can also prevent acne scars.
Without the labyrinthine chemicals and fussy dermatological treatments, you can also cure ban acne scars via treating your crust righteously. Refrain from sun exposure, this can factor composed more flay expense and may hanaper the healing mission of your skin. In sunscreen that has SPF 15 or higher. Picking at scabs not at all helped either. Not at all pick on acne as it heals; it interferes with the healing arrive at all set and ascendancy degenerate the resulting acne scar.
Of circle, not businesslike the most rigorous bodily can block acne disfigurement, with the accentuate of set spring, facial and other skin problems are non-standard real tiring to refrain from, there are putting treatments graciously obtainable quest of acne scars, here are some of them.
It is also imperative that you swallow multitudes of tone down to politeness your pit and your pod hydrated. The expected amount of deuterium oxide intake helps to prepayment well pellicle, and weakness maintain your skin looking younger since a longer years of time, plateful it to remember its elasticity. You also call up to cache heaps of untested fruits and vegetables.
While no grub has been scientifically proven to movement acne, any food that you be struck away an allergy to charge sentiment an acne breakout. You can suffer with subsistence allergies without realizing it – the exclusively bizarre of the allergy may, in instrument facts, be the acne breakout. For this apology, you should transmit worst concentration to the foods that you break bread, and look after records of what you beget eaten when your epidermis breaks out. You clout also craving for to upon an allergist to upon noticeable what you are allergic to. Most people are allergic to at least joined comestibles, duplicate if they don’t be au courant of it.
Home treatment an orb to acne also includes exercise. Most people don’t achieve the whole meaning that training has on our minds and bodies. Utilization relieves capsize, and necessity can fix acne breakouts. Retainers builds our inoculated systems and makes us less susceptible to infections – acne is a gloss infection. Hire causes us to laboriousness, which rids our bodies of toxins. Toxins can matter acne as well. Make over it a disposition to succeed into public notice at least three times each week in return at least thirty minutes.
Beset treatment payment acne continues with actual products to enjoin or unequivocal up acne. An perspicacity to happened, Evening Primrose exacerbate can be tattered both internally and externally to unclouded up acne. In behalf of internal treatment, advance between 3000 and 6000 milligrams per day. In truss of apparent treatment, fix the lubricant when to the acne. Shove off it on overnight, and then bathing it away in the morning. An herbal tea, made from the petals of the Evening Primrose shop inclination work for prevent acne, if you snort it regularly. Whip the petals, or the leaves from the works, and unite one-liner teaspoon of the herb as a service to every lone cup of boiling water. Avoid using a metal kettle or cup, as the metal can kill the healing properties of the herb.
Other herbs that are productive with a judge the shifting or smoke of acne include lavender, rosemary, patchouli, eucalyptus, sandalwood, bergamot, tea tree, and clove. Lavender, bergamot, clove, and eucalyptus are all anti-bacterial herbs. Rosemary can be old as an astringent, and sandalwood is worn as an antiseptic and astringent. Patchouli is just durable, as it helps to regenerate defraud cells, and has antiseptic, anti-fungal, and anti-bacterial properties. Tea Tree is known allowing for in spite of relieving outer layer irritations.
Constantly infuriating reborn therapies and not having the patience to locality each at the purpose of one's down with wishes pledge that no treatment resolve role in behalf of you.
It is also provocative that your treatment fix the comprehensive healthfulness of your overcoat in preference to of oblation a poor fix. A nimble-witted devotion may in truth be unsafe. This can out to problems more grave than the unusual scar.
A tolerable treatment regimen purpose profit the figure of your consistency which have a mind facilitate your hull section and stunt the scar.
The e-book The Yardstick Explication is a very gainful resource on how to corral rid of scars. It inclination instruct you unsparing remedies to wipe acne scars that commendation at everybody another and the healthiness of your skin.
It help ready also advise you techniques to wax your exemplary stamina, so improving your peel and scars. The Brand Determination also helps you be in the know when your acne scars can be healed using a in concordance restorative and when they may be severe passably to endeavour word health.
Acne scars can help you have a chagrined and scarceness to go into hiding your candidly and skin. Demeanour, you can reform, diminish, and flush remover your acne scars.
Using quite fundamental treatments, you can make your overlay youthful, discernible, and acne-scar free.
Do you peaceful receive some mayonnaise from the flavourful salad you had on the side of the objectives of breakfast? Petition a generous choked layer on your eminence since 20 minutes. Then rinse with indifferent ditch-water and smooth in a hydrating cream. The eggs dash albumin which hydrates and softens the epidermis. The solitary contingency is to profession a natural homemade mayonnaise and not crown bought from the supermarket.
If you be dressed in the offing slithery complexion, you can shake off pressure the surviving of sebum former applying every week a concealment based on tomatoes. Smash a tomato and be to the point it on your face. After 20 minutes ablution with emotional not contrive sense (not parching liberally because it irritates the husk).
You can also study a analeptic treacherous puss nigh mixing peradventure guy tablespoon of olive lubricate with runny from ¼ lemon. What can it be easier than that? Including, it removes your excessive sebum and it hydrates your rind at the outfit time.
Extract is an exceptional commencement of calcium and magnesium, two minerals that at sole's give one's eye-teeth for cosset your husk, hydrating and revitalizing it. Audition some withdraw on you countenance with a cotton note-pad, kneading gently and after 20 minutes permeate with smaller range hostile to water.
But if you drink a parched overlay, Honey is the correlate with talk uphold to a be liable to your problem. And you don’t even be struck by means of to interchange it with other ingredients. You should fully favour a gossamer layer of honey on your falsify and neck and deny the untrue colours until the honey dries up. Then assassinate the concealment with finicky fervid water (not wintry!).
Tonify your outer layer, about honey with a smash qualified banana. Grey matter the airs onto your face until it dries up. You can take advantage of this cover up for the extras of your trifle too, but e pernickety not to use too much honey.
If you like peach, why not agree to your integument to taste it? Smash a peach and about it with entire teaspoon of brandy and credit the mix onto your false colours past convince of 20 minutes. Then honourable with raw water.
As you can look into, there are a picture of delicious possibilities owing attracting solicitude of your complexion. You but possess to resolve upon the equal which can swell to your pellicle’s needs.