Tag Archives: Memorial Hospital

University of Colorado lease does not guarantee Memorial Hospital will continue to admit Medicare patients

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.– Local voters have until next week to decide whether to accept the offer to lease the city’s Memorial Hospital to a University of Colorado non-profit entity, but there is no guarantee that the community health needs will continue to be met, in particular, that Memorial will continue to accept Medicare. Indications are not encouraging. At a symposium held tonight by 9 to 5 Colorado addressing privatization of public services, it was revealed that Memorial provides more care to indigents than any other hospital in the state. At the same time, the Denver hospital run by the University of Colorado currently ranks last there for indigent care. Apparently teaching hospitals prefer teachable cases, and excuse themselves from the cases that create billing difficulties because “it’s not their mission.” Alas, the prestige of becoming a teaching hospital is how politicians are selling the Memorial deal, now obviously dubious. And ordinarily the privatization of medical facilities in Colorado is regulated by what’s called a “conversion statute” except –it protects the public interest only in cases of hospitals sold, not leased! While a 40-year “lease” sounds less commital, it actually circumvents Colorado’s protections. Now let’s consider the implementation of President Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act which may take some financial pressure off hospitals. Why-ever is Colorado Springs rushing to privatize before that card is face up? You can bet the medical industrialists have already factored that windfall into the profit they’re going to turn from cutting out everyone else who falls in the cracks. And we will have no say in the matter, because the lease makes that much clear. Why not ask our city attorney to confirm we’re screwed before the election and not after?

Tea party klan patriot thug Jim Kross circulates fliers to incite mob violence

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OccupyAfghanistan vets Jeremy and Brittany Westmoreland attracted Patriot Shop teabag Jim Kross to their vow to destroy our local occupy. I’d like to say as little as possible about this lamentable development, except to document today’s escalation.


Occupy Colorado Springs held forth on the sidewalk in front of Memorial Hospital this Saturday, making a plea for UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE. Across the street once again were our threat-making stalkers, fortunately not reprising their Westboro Baptist tauntings, but sitting in their truck as OCS’s original heckler Jim Kross finished his cigar.


We weren’t many, but of course the recent news stories didn’t help recruit participants, claiming that OCS is so against the troops, that it kicked out members because they were soldiers. And not more accurately, because they initiated a witch hunt against occupiers who weren’t showing solidarity with the US military’s occupy movement, OccupyIraq, OccupyAfghanistan, OccupyLibya, veni, vidi, vici.


We were in the unusual position of trying not to elicit honks of support from the passing traffic, in view of standing outside a hospital, but drivers signaled their enthusiasm in friendly ways. We discussed repeating this healthcare action soon, it was such an easy sell.


Eventually Patriot Kross came over to film us as he made his best taunts. The Westmorelands watched from the truck and after Kross was through, they drove back and forth flipping us off.

At first Kross denied any knowledge of the dozen fliers we’d found taped and pinned around the hospital’s perimeter.


The fliers were “wanted” posters which offered a bounty for the eviction or firing of certain occupiers. The fliers bore Kross’s email address and website. He conceded they were his, or belonged “to one of [his] identities,” whatever, and then he named the reward, said the amount may have grown since he looked online, and then solicited the occupiers present.


We had already removed the fliers he’d circulated around the hospital, from trees, street signs, walls and doors.


We had found some fliers downtown on our way to the action. This one was taped to the office building door.


Jim Kross’s animosity for Occupy goes back to the original GAs, when he used to videotape from the circle’s center and exploit the opportunity it gave him to counter everyone’s statements. He hadn’t been harassing OCS actions until last week when OCS held its NO WAR ON IRAN event. Kross made a gleeful reappearance with Raven Martinez counter-protesting what she considered an anti-troop message.

Speaking of Raven, I received this Facebook message on Friday, from her daughter’s account which Raven uses when she finds her account blocked…


Are those the words of an 11-year-old? “WATCH UR BACK”?

Neither Raven nor the Westmorelands seem to understand the line they cross with their threats. On Tuesday Raven defended her comment on NMT asking me what I’d do if my home went up in flames. She said I needed to take it in the context of her talking about soldiers, police and first responders, ignoring the context Soldier Westmoreland had created with his vow to burn NMT down.


Patriot Kross says he’s a veteran of the police force. You’d think he’d understand that distributing wanted posters charging his own personal complaints is a call for vigilante justice. To begin with, posting fliers is against city code, and these incite violence.


Kross came across our noon bannering at Acacia on Friday, mocking Patti for standing on her lonesome, Occupy reduced to just herself. He didn’t like the color of her flags.


I caught this priceless photo as Kross stepped quickly back when he saw that reinforcements were coming.


The bright side of this story is that when I went to take a picture of Jim Kross’s store, the Patriot Shop, it was gone, in retreat, to within another store, on Academy. Bye Jimbo.

Helicopter crashes in foothills of Pikes Peak, local Gazette calls it hard landing

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COLORADO SPRINGS- The complicit media accepts the Army’s characterization of the 1:30AM crash as a “hard landing” and neither the condition of the Apache Longbow aircraft nor its occupants is being revealed; even though emergency vehicles reached the downed Apache via Gold Camp Road and the crew were rushed to Memorial Hospital, civilian jurisdiction. The citizens of Colorado Springs are being kept on a need to know basis, as Fort Carson increases its flight training for choppers being deployed to Afghanistan, even as the training battleground becomes the skies about our neighborhoods.

Would you believe Fortune 500 corps & “Bat Gangs?” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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Poverty threatens sense of prosperityFrom the same mouth that told reporters the ludicrous tale that scouts from two Fortune 500 companies told a local realtor (let’s leave her unnamed, shall we) they rejected locating in Colorado Springs on account of the city’s homeless camps along I-25 –yeah right– comes a really despicable meme she’s now trying to spread of teenage “bat gangs” purportedly terrorizing our homeless.

The fabrication serves two purposes: to lend urgency to efforts to get the homeless out of their tents, and to scare the vulnerable would-be victims themselves. A tent isn’t shelter enough if there are gangs of youth ready to bludgeon every homeless they encounter.

I was almost taken in myself when I received this email titled “HOMELESS ATTACKS”, the text of which has also been copy and pasted unto other online forums:

Sitting here with a homeless friend who got beat up by the Bat Gang on Saturday. He said it was 8 kids with baseball bats who attacked him under the Bijou Bridge. He was taken to Memorial Hospital and spent the night. He got stitches around his right eye and his right elbow.

We’re lucky he is alive! Again we need your support to transition the homeless out of the tent camps to shelters.

It turns out a user “Beepbeep” has been peddling this hard on local websites, luckily without much traction. Any ideas about how to intervene if she lands another TV interview? Fear-mongering like this slanders the CSPD and further erodes the image of Colorado Springs.

A search of the Gazette brings up the murder last year of a vagrant on the I-25 pedestrian overpass, killed with a baseball bat. A teen bragged to his a friend about the crime, and now the friend may be implicated as well. This is a development from the recent trial. From this our enterprising Iago has extrapolated a “bat gang” of malevolent teens, to put fear into stories told around homeless campfires.

Her most recent example cannot be corroborated. Even given the benefit of the doubt, our misinformant may have fallen dupe to a homeless cliche, the public drunk’s version of “a dog ate my homework.” I remember from friends cleaning up their act at the Salvation Army, when someone fell off the wagon and returned literally bruised, from a fall or fight they were too inebriated to remember, the blame was cast away from themselves. What happened was often a recurring theme, the bang-up attributed to “teenage tormentors” armed with bats.

Can you think of a more despicable strategy, to haunt the neighborhood with a fictional specter, all for the sake of trying to shoo the homeless out of town. It’s the KKK’s burning cross strategy isn’t it?

The mellow waters of the Springs

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tap waterLast week the Gazette reported that Colorado Springs had been found to have methadone and Valium in our tap water, making us one mellow city indeed. Drugs found in Springs water This news was reported in the Denver papers, too, but nobody mentioned where the drugs were coming from?

You probably thought it was coming from drug addicts in their private castles, right? Well… wrong. And don’t look for investigative reporting from the local papers to correct your lack of info either. From the national AP we learn from where these drugs were most likely released into our tap water, and it may surprise you, or not? Tons of Drugs Dumped Into Wastewater

The drugs probably came into the Colorado Springs water supply by way of the local hospitals, Penrose and Memorial? Hey, they wanted the waters to be mellow in the Springs! Don’t grow old waiting for The Gazette to do some follow up reporting on this one. It most likely just won’t happen…

It’s against the law to be for peace and not for war

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The Tejon Street stand off, taser versus maracaTodays peace contingent in the Colorado Springs Saint Patricks Day parade was physically attacked by the police about 5 minutes after we began the walk. One or two people were told that our permission to participate had been revoked, and within seconds the police assaulted us.

Most of us never even heard that they were revoking the permission that we had to participate at all, before we found ourselves watching the police assault selected members our our group. This assault occurred as hundreds looked on in shock. Children began to cry as they saw their parents being taken down and put into choke holds while in handcuffs behind their back face down on the pavement. One of us who was unable to actually walk was pulled from the vehicle accompanying us onto the pavement and bruised badly enough as she was pulled across the pavement to need ememrgency care at Memorial Hospital. Leaders of the 2 main peace groups in Colorado Springs were assaulted, placed in handcuffs, and then held in police cars while being processed. Several children became lost in the parade as they were slightly ahead of their parents who found themselves in the melee.

There was absolutely no cause for our permission to be revoked in such a manner. We had our signs out, our peace shirts on, and a few green flags with peace symbols on them before the parade even got off. The time between the notification for us to remove ourselves from the parade and when the police began their attack was just a second or two. It was as if this was a deliberate plan to have an excuse to physcially assault us, since being for peace in a parade of this sorts in Colorado Springs certainly was little more than being mere balance to the army fatigues on children in some groups, plus the contingents of pro war city council parading their campaigns in front of the crowd. No problem for those people at all, yet we evidently merited a police assault in the middle of the parade!

I have just seen some of the local TV coverage where the only comment about this assault is that people for peace had no permission to protest here by parade organizers. We had gotten permission to participate in this event, and then within seconds we had this permission revoked and an assault on us began. Certainly if the parade directors had felt we were not wanted, they could easily have notified us with more than a few seconds before having the cops beat on us. The fact that they did not, speaks loudly to the piossibility that they delberately cherished the idea of assaulting peace people walking with them, even as pro military contingents were widely evident and welcomed everywhere in the parade.

There was even one group of about 20-25 kids dressed up in Rambo fatigues, but our peace signs were used as reason to assault a group of mainly retired people! Pretty sad stuff overall. I think that the kids with us learned a lot about America today.