I posted earlier in the month about disabled activists being arrested outside of Sen. John McCain’s Washington office. I was unsure about the situation and how it was handled, but I found a post from Disabled Soapbox taking us into the action.
Look at the post from the day before for an explanation of the ADAPT community’s demands.
Twenty disabled activists, many of them in wheelchairs, were arrested outside of Sen. John McCain’s Washington office after being denied a meeting to discuss bill S. 799. The bill, stuck in committee since last year, would amend the Social Security Act to allow people who are eligible for Medicaid coverage of nursing home costs to spend it instead on home-based, or community care.
“If he should be president, it would be ironic that he comes from a party that talks a lot about family values,” said Bob Kafka, national organizer for ADAPT, a group advocating for passage of the bill. Without the legislation, many disabled and elderly people don’t have the choice to apply coverage to anything other than institutional care, he said.
Sponsored by Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., it also would grant extra money to states that participate in the program, according to a summary of the bill.
Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, are co-sponsors of the bill, but McCain is not.
Sen. McCain’s representatives said that the protesters were offered a meeting with aides, but McCain himself was out of town campaigning in Florida.
OK, I wasn’t there. I don’t know the he said, she said of the drama, but what were the activists doing to get arrested? The AP story said they were arrested for unlawful assembly, but it seems a little ridiculous to me.
Any thoughts on the bill or the arrests? (more…)
The Dallas Morning News had an article this weekend about a man with cerebral palsy who is working to achieve his goal of walking each hole at every PGA tour stop in 2008. Friday was the 17th stop of a 38-week season.
D.J. Gregory, 30, has progressed from using a four-wheel walker, then a two-wheel walker, then two canes and now he walks the courses with one cane.
Gregory is keeping a blog to document his journey. My favorite part of the blog is a chart he updates every week with important stats like how many miles he’s walked, how many bottles of water consumed, and how many falls he’s taken. (Week 17: 338 miles walked/117 bottles of water/14 falls)
