_______________ NURSING DEATH BY DAWN MacKEEN (06/16/98)
	My daughter-in-law breast-fed my grandson. My son and daughter-in-law have medical insurance and a highly recommended pediatrician. The baby was having difficulty eating (breast or bottle), acting hungry, beginning to eat, then fussing, falling asleep and waking up to eat again in about an hour and a half. This went on for three months. They were taking the baby to the clinic, talking to the nurse outside office hours and the pediatrician had seen the baby on several occasions. No referrals were made for support groups, even though they live in the city. They called support groups for information but didn't find any that were meeting at the time. When the baby became dehydrated and was hospitalized at 3 months, the pediatrician finally sent in a nose and throat doctor who, while looking for other problems, said the baby had a cleft uvula. This meant it took an extra effort for him to create the suction necessary to nurse, which tired him, then he would get milk in his nose, which made him cry and tired him, and then he would fall asleep without getting enough to eat. I saw the parents call the nurse in the middle of the night almost at their wit's end, saying, "This baby is hungry and we want to feed him, but he can't eat!" And the burden was always put back onto them. Even before the cleft uvula was discovered, we had, through trial and error, begun to find other ways to try to get food into this baby -- putting breast milk in bottles, sitting him almost upright to feed him, etc. -- which were the instructions that were given after the diagnosis was made. The point is that in spite of two parents and an extended family who attended to him all the time, medical insurance and a well-recommended pediatrician, this baby was near death from malnourishment at 3 months old. We said at the time that if he had been born to a poor family who couldn't access medical care, he might not have lived. What is criminal in the cases reported in your story is that babies can be denied medical care. Who knows what was wrong with these infants? Certainly not the doctors who never looked at them! It is obscene that the mothers are being held criminally negligent in the death of these children! -- Linda Davis H aving just read your article on the mother charged in her baby's death (because she breast-fed and the baby supposedly died of malnutrition), I decided to follow the links and read your "related stories." One was a light piece on using frozen breast milk (and all its "hazards") as a recipe ingredient, the other was a cautionary tale on how dreadful it is to use a breast pump. This leaves me with a question: Do you plan on ever publishing a positive article about breast-feeding? Or would that cause "Mothers Who Think" to think too much? -- Joanne Hamilton I read with interest the discussion of punishment for the young women whose babies died as a result of malnutrition from insufficient breast-feeding. As an emergency department pediatrician in one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, I'm aware of the difficulty faced by mothers who try to get care for their babies -- even in a town where two kinds of MediCal and a charity hospital are available. I feel that no new mother should be released from a hospital without a follow-up appointment for her baby scheduled for the next week -- no clinic fees, no insurance check, no wallet biopsy, no nonmedical farting around. Breast-feeding, contrary to the granola-flavored imagery, is a tricky skill to master, and even an experienced nursing mother can use a little help from lactation specialists -- it is no disgrace to need a hand. Additionally, it's difficult for a mother to assess weight loss or gain without a scale, and trying to judge other measures, like urine output or skin tone, is a lot easier if someone is showing you what to look for -- in short, professional guidance is indispensable, unless we as a society accept that high infant mortality among the poor is acceptable. In closing, I feel that every group or organization that uses the words "baby" or "family" for political ends should be compelled to donate at least one-tenth of its budget to prenatal care services for the poor, resources for new parents and infant health care. Are you listening, Operation Rescue? Sound like anyone you know, Right to Life? -- Michael Treece, M.D. San Francisco
_______________ SOURCE FOR KATHLEEN WILLEY STORY SUES NEWSWEEK'S MICHAEL ISIKOFF BY JOE CONASON (06/12/98)
	If Jonathan Broder (Joe Conason??) thinks that Michael Isikoff and Newsweek are "mouthpieces" for Kenneth Starr, what does that make Broder, Waas, Conason and Salon? Leaks in Washington are a way of life, as your writers well know, but seem loathe to admit. -- Kenneth Kraska
_______________ FALLOUT FROM CONTENT BOMBSHELL BY JONATHAN BRODER (06/16/98)
	Now that Ken Starr has been revealed as the phantom leaker -- to the surprise of no one -- he is desperately attempting to salvage what's left of his reputation by screaming libel. Brill must be salivating over the prospect that Starr would really initiate a libel action. This would give Brill and his lawyers access to Starr's records and the opportunity to depose Starr, his staff and his stooges in the media under oath. The best Starr could hope for under such a scenario is to avoid prison. His reputation and probably his law license would both be casualties. -- Paul Gottlieb
_______________ FIGHT THE POWER BY DAVID HOROWITZ (06/15/98)
	I felt it necessary to place David Horowitz's statements referring to the "McCarthy Era" into some kind of reasonable historical perspective. The other day I listened to a tape of the House Committee on Un-American Activities' interrogation of Bertolt Brecht, one of the century's most influential and important playwrights. Throughout the hearing the committee distinguishes itself by its remarkable and appalling showmanship in the service of fascism. It is relentless in its pursuit of its predetermined conclusions. Whatever small shreds of "evidence" the committee comes up with are shamelessly twisted and taken out of context by an interrogator who has obviously decided that the witness is a communist, apparently because he's a foreigner, an artist and speaks with a funny accent. Whenever the witness is unable to recall who he spoke to on various dates up to 30 years before the hearing, the gallery audience snickers, apparently having also made up their minds about this foreign devil. Brecht, who spent most of his artistic life doing battle with fascists in Europe, offered an eloquent prepared statement (deemed irrelevant to the committee's investigation and therefore suppressed) that warned Americans against going down what he must have perceived to be an all-too-familiar path. Mr. Horowitz compares this horror, which is one of the most shameful spectacles in American history, with the fact that he and a few of his friends, who resemble the very people in that congressional hearing room, aren't paid enough for speaking engagements or welcomed with open arms into institutions of higher learning. As far as I can see there are two kinds of people who follow the so-called right-wing line these days: the ruthless and cynical on one hand, and those who they manipulate on the other. The term "conservative," which once may have stood for a belief in smaller government and less taxes, now applies to those willing to commit any kind of obscenity to support their privileges as an elite core of corporate criminals. From the McCarthy hearings to the Nixon and then the Reagan presidency, and on to the present Congress, these people have maintained an absolute consistency of intent that reflects the worst of what we are as a nation. Horowitz portrays the cultural conflict in shallow terms of "liberal" vs. "conservative," and treats it all like some kind of game played among the chosen few. I must say that if it is a game, it has grown much larger than the game the right wing thinks it controls. On the other end of the ticket, represented by the arrogance and power of Horowitz and his crowd, is an expanding reservoir of international rage. Among the growing numbers of the disenfranchised and those who must struggle to survive in a hostile environment created in the shadow of racist greed, there is a growing will to tear down the fabric of lies. Unlike many times in the past, the opposition is both highly motivated and highly organized. Sooner or later the balance will turn and cynical power junkies like those for whom David Horowitz has chosen to speak will reap exactly what they have sown. -- Ralph E. Melcher SALON | June 19, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| FIGHT THE POWER BY DAVID HOROWITZ

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