Biden and Walter: Separated at Birth?

 

Of course, Walter opted against the hair plugs.

Biden photo courtesy of the Economist

Consider Me 'Especially Unchastened'

I don't know who Charles Lane is or how he landed a job at the Post--and regardless of your personal thoughts on medical marijuana--this is just insipid nonsense:

The death of John Patrick Bedell, the 36-year-old man shot and killed by Pentagon police officers after he opened fire on them March 4, is a tragedy. It might have been avoided if Bedell had received timely and effective treatment for his obviously serious mental illness. The fact that he did not is a cause for soul-searching by all of us. Advocates of “medical marijuana” should be especially chastened.

I, for one, am not one bit chastened by my open advocacy for the legalization of drugs, especially medical cannabis. That Bedell's alleged bi-polar disorder went un- or mistreated has absolutely no bearing whatever that he self-medicated with marijuana. His family was apparently well aware of his mental health issues and he did not receive adequate treatment for it hardly makes medical cannabis blameworthy in this.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to delve into Bedell's medical and personal history, but even if we take Mr. Lane's story at face value--that Bedell sought treatment for insomnia in 2006 where his doctor may or may not have properly searched for the underlying cause for that insomnia--blaming a medicine is intellectually derelict.

If some doctor treated a broken leg with Vicodin and no other remedy--such as to properly set the broken bone--the fault lies not with the Vicodin, but with the inadequate treatment on behalf of the physician. Likewise, if a doctor doesn't properly diagnose a severe mental disorder that would be evident through routine examination, the doctor--and not the prescribed inadequate remedy--is to blame.

But Lane continues on this irresponsible crusade against medical cannabis:

Let’s debate legalizing marijuana as a recreational drug. If smoking pot makes terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients feel better, give it to them.

But, for the most part, “medical marijuana” is a pseudo-scientific myth, and a dangerous one at that.

Parsing this a bit: "if it makes terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients feel better" belies the reason many of those patience actually use cannabis: It isn't to escape the pain or feel kinda groovy--which, admittedly, is a side-effect--it allows many of them to eat without vomiting from the chemotherapy and other chemical cocktails they are taking. There are plenty of pain medicines that get you high--"opiates" or "opioids" are among the strongest and derived from the same plant you get opium and heroin. No one doubts their efficacy or propriety just because they--and alternate forms of the drug--are often used recreationally or abused.

Mr. Lane appears to be operating on a fallacious assumption: that because a medicine doesn't come with a stamp from Eli Lilly or Merck that it has no legitimate medicinal purpose. But medicines are just chemicals that interact with the body for an intended effect. If cannabis alleviates nausea and increases appetite in sick people--which it most certainly does--it has a legitimate medicinal effect and should therefore be considered a legitimate treatment. That some doctors may neglect their patients' underlying problems should not be put at the feet of medical cannabis availability--that is medical malpractice.

I mean to make no insinuations about Bedell's prescribing physician, particularly. I don't know what happened and I don't pretend to--although Mr. Lane seems perfectly fine with insinuating malpractice, but that's between him and his editors. Nevertheless, it is blatantly irresponsible of Mr. Lane to assign blame to the medical cannabis activist community because one man with severe mental issues smoked marijuana under medical pretenses for one month during an unknown period of time of already "excessive" marijuana use.

Bedell was a troubled man and it's a shame that whatever help he sought/was given was insufficient. It is certainly plausible that other people culpable in all of this, (i.e., how did a mentally disturbed man acquire two handguns?), but people who want to improve the life of very sick people are not among them.

You don't have to believe that medical cannabis is legitimate treatment to realize that this piece was half-assed scapegoating. Charles Lane and the Washington Post should be ashamed of themselves.

The Disconnect Makes My Head Hurt

Yesterday, HHS Secretary Sebelius toured the Sunday talk-show circuit, criticizing the health insurance industry after some disappointing talks at the White House last week. Unsurprisingly, the president today began criticizing  the insurance industry too, echoing Sebelius by complaining of price hikes and such.

The headache-inducing disconnect is induced by the fact that the health care reform bills that are currently being bribed through negotiated in Congress right now will mandate the public to buy from these erstwhile greedy bastards--further cartelizing the insurance industry. Unless the U.S. Congress, in its collective wisdom, has solved the knowledge problem, the insurance companies' profits will either swell beyond what they should or be entirely eliminated due to the imposed and inflexible regulation with no guarantee of lower premiums or out-of-pocket costs to the consumer. Indeed, if the insurance companies can't survive with the price controls the government will almost surely implement, then the U.S. taxpayer will pick up the shortfall a la Fannie and Freddie (...and BoA, GM, etc.). So while our insurance bills may not see an immediate spike (tho, I would bet they will after any bailout), the cost will be evident at tax time--especially for the poor.

And please, don't trot out the cost-saving aspects of the plans. 

Furthermore, it's nauseating to hear Dems simultaneously talk about the virtues of democracy and how the system is broken because a simple majority isn't enough to pass the bill in the Senate--despite the inconvenient reality that a majority of the American people hasn't been in favor of this massive insurance company welfare plan since at least July.

As the cliche goes, actions speak louder than words. Right now, the Democrats are saying that despite their public criticisms about the greed of the insurance companies, the government is going to force you to buy their services whether you like it or not and, in spite of you (collectively) clearly not liking it, it will be forced upon you...

...in the name of "democracy."

The Pair on These Two!

Ok, so I'm scanning through my reader today and come upon this about the recent Congressional ethics investigations and exonerations over at DiA:

"Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member's actions are being influenced by campaign contributions," the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct said in a unanimous statement.

In 2008, the seven lawmakers the committee cleared of any wrongdoing had steered $112m in earmarks to clients of the PMA Group, a lobbying organisation. In that same year, they accepted a total of $350,000 in campaign contributions from those clients. The contributions, they maintained, had nothing to do with the earmarks. And a committee of their peers backed them up. To paraphrase Jon Stewart in another context: I don't think they're stupid. I think they think we're stupid.

By the tone of the people harping on the Citizens United decision which freed domestic corporations and groups from onerous and arbitrary limits in independent expenditures (read: their own political ads without direction from, permission of, and wholly separate from political candidates), you'd think the floodgates guarding our fragile democracy had finally been opened to corporate America. It turns out, however, corporate America just needed to go to the right Congressional offices:

The representatives in question are Democrats Norm Dicks, Marcy Kaptur, James Moran, and the late John Murtha, and Republicans Todd Tiahrt, Peter Visclosky, and Bill Young.

Not surprisingly, and as far as I can tell, the Republicans were all silent on Citizens United. (Indeed, my superficial search shows that two of them may have taken from the case's namesake organization.) And, to their credit, neither the late Jack "Corrupt for his Constituency" Murtha nor Norm Dicks had the cojones to openly criticize the Citizens United ruling. (And yes, Murtha was still alive when the decision came down.) The same restraint could not be shown by Reps. Marcy Kaptur and James Moran.

From Moran's Citizens United press release:

Today’s Supreme Court decision represents a monumental step backwards for American democracy and will allow corporations to drown out the voices of average Americans. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn precedent and allow corporations to spend unrestricted resources on political activities will undermine the public’s confidence that the government is acting in their best interest on issues such as the economy, health care and energy policy.

Not to be outdone in testicular grandiosity, the gentlewoman from Ohio's Ninth district introduced legislation to curb express displeasure with independent expenditures (Official Summary):

1/8/2009--Introduced.Expresses the sense of Congress that the Supreme Court misinterpreted the First Amendment to the Constitution in the case of Buckley v. Valeo because the decision failed to recognize:
(1) that the unlimited spending of large amounts of money on elections has a corrosive effect on the electoral process not simply because of direct transactions between those who give large amounts of money and candidates and elected officials but because the presence of unlimited amounts of money corrupts the process on a more fundamental level; and
(2) other legitimate state interests which justify limiting money in campaigns, including the need to preserve the integrity of our republican form of government, restore public confidence in government, and ensure all citizens a more equal opportunity to participate in the political process.

We need more outrageous hypocrites like Jim Moran and Marcy Kaptur as the standard bearers for restoring "public confidence in government" because we should have exactly much confidence in our government as we have in them. Clearly, direct quid pro quo bribery is much better for democracy than the warping influence and appearance of independent spending.

CBS v. FCC

Just a programming note:

I was flipping through the channels late Saturday night/early Sunday morning and saw that C-SPAN was re-airing the oral argument in the free speech case in the 3rd Circuit case CBS v. FCC. If you want to hear how an otherwise intelligent government lawyer attempt to justify government sanction against the display of part of a human body--and the common sense argument against such absurdity--you can listen to the argument here.

CBS is represented by Robert Corn-Revere, whom I've had the pleasure to meet and work with in the past. He most recently wrote an excellent article for the Cato Supreme Court Review on FOX's battle with the FCC that you can read here.

28 Days of Mindless Racial Pandering and Other Trivial Pursuits

It's that time of year: Black History Month is upon us again. It's that one month a year America pretends to care about black people. Woo.


I tried to unsubscribe from the GOP.com mailing list that I've been on for years after one particularly annoying email during the 2008 campaign but, alas, I am still on it. (Sorry, I don't remember what was in the email.) I never read the damned things unless the headline is particularly catching--and today, of course, my morbid curiosity made me open it:

STATEMENT FROM RNC CHAIRMAN MICHAEL STEELE ON BLACK HISTORY MONTH 

[All caps in original. RNC's New Media team apparently has yet to master common internet etiquette.]


Anyway, the banal shout-outs to our forebears is embedded below:





Not to be outdone, Senator Harry Reid penned an op-ed establishing the little known fact that black Americans are indeed Americans just like everybody else. No, really, it's titled:

Sen. Harry Reid: Black history is American history

Thanks, Hank. Perhaps you could elaborate on this obscure fact for us just a little bit more?

While the progress we've made together as a nation is laudable, those of us who've been on the frontlines know that much work still lies ahead of us. Like all communities, the African-American community is concerned with ensuring security and stability for themselves and their families. African-Americans, just like all Americans, want to have a steady job [sic; I think the 33 or so million of us want more than ONE job between us] that they can depend on, stay in their homes, afford quality health care for themselves and their children, have the ability to send their children to the best schools, know that they're safe in their homes and communities and are able to plan for retirement.

How many people on the "frontlines" of civil rights today still refer to "Negro dialect"? Furthermore, his "progressive" thinking has gotten him only so far as to take most of a paragraph to explain that black people are just like everybody else? I'll be the last person to say we're in a post-racial society, but is the above explanation really necessary? 

I want to reiterate what I wrote in an earlier post: I don't think Reid is a racist. I just think he's a putz. 

Reid is just one of many nitwits that will be pandering to black people this month--many of whom will be mistaking trivia for history. (The color of the man who invented the traffic light, though interesting and useful in it's own way, is of considerably less significance than understanding the astonishing figures of wealth represented in and created by the slave labor upon which this country was built.) 30-second soundbite commercials by black celebrities paid for by this or that corporation (::cough, cough:: speech ::cough, cough::) highlighting this or that historical contribution is better than nothing, I suppose, but missing the overall point: The way our history is being taught is sorely lacking substance, in "black" history and almost all other aspects of American and world history. Watered-down historical accounts dominated by names and dates that run together is a piss-poor way of enlightening a young mind as to how our country--and our world--developed. The old adage that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it isn't referring to date memorization.

So, if you want to do something of use for Black History Month, I suggest reading a book or two that takes a serious look at black life in America from either a literary or academic perspective. I'll post suggestions for various types of readings soon...none of which will include Harry Reid.

Last year's post on BHM here.

Mood Music Monday