Ooooh, did they have you all worried about tomatoes and salmonella?  Have you been all upset the FDA couldn't track down the culprits?  Were you assiduously following the tomato trail, wondering where it would lead?  And did you find that suddenly, it was jalapenos all along?  Geez, It's like tracking Osama and next thing you know, we're in Iraq after WMDs, and no one can find either.

Actually, it's very much like that.  Fear, fear, fear.  Upsetting the public, so everyone will be eager for a push for ... war.  So, when it comes to tomatoes - scratch that, jalapenos - the public is scared again, and the government suggests more FDA power to track better those enemy germs and more regulations, it just like more troops and extensions of FISA.  

WMDs.  Oh my gosh.  Rev up the military.  

Salmonella.  Oh dear, oh dear.  Rev up the FDA.  

Only ... didn't we get set up about WMDs, if I remember correctly?

McCain's team is known to be flush with "lobbyists" and some of them are top-level people opposed to anything resembling healthcare "reform".

Drug Lobby Spends $1 Billion, Study Finds

Republicans in general, of course, are to blame for much of our screwed-up healthcare in this country. Big Pharma slides them billions of dollars, they in turn give Big Pharma all sorts of perks - illegally and unethically.

The original version of this essay contained a huge number of references.  Check on georgefearing.com in the near future for the annotated version.

The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives rarely presides over proceedings in the House chambers, but instead delegates this prerogative to a Member of the same political party. In the early morning of November 22, 2003, House Speaker Dennis Hastert delegated his presiding officer role to a loyal attendant, my congressman, Doc Hastings.

At exactly 3 a.m., Saturday, November 22, 2003, Richard "Doc" Hastings (R-WA), presiding over the House of Representatives, announced that time for debate on President Bush's Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act had expired. "Members will have 15 minutes to record their votes," Hastings declared. Nevertheless, Hastings’’ forecast missed the mark as Hastings reneged on his deadline and delayed the vote’s ending so that Republican leadership could manipulate votes.

At the end of fifteen minutes, the vote was 210 in favor and 224 opposed to the Medicare drug bill. 17 Republicans voted to defeat the measure. Hastings, at the prompting of Republican leaders, refused to end the vote, however.

I have been thinking about this for several months, and everything just sort of crystallized a few moments ago. In quite an unrelated area I was responding to a comment on a Kos diary about Owsley Stanley, the legendary LSD chemist of the 1960’s. It turns out that he was treated for throat cancer in 1999, and he attributed it to passive tobacco smoke at the time. As it turns out, it most likely was caused by HPV infection of one of his tonsils.

Or at least helped his own treatment. According to a Wired article one of the most effective treatments for the very type of cancer Kennedy has been diagnosed with is venom from the giant yellow israeli scorpion combined with iodine. The article states that the venom and iodine ignore healthy cells while binding to, and destroying the cancerous cells.

How did Kennedy Help with this? Follow below the fold

    If I hear or read about another billionaire claiming that the current economic woes we are suffering as a nation is due to our "entitlement" programs, I am going to scream. The latest in the long line of billionaire apologist is Pete Peterson. Mr. Peterson, is a longtime opponent of Social Security, Medicaid, and any other government programs targeted to help the needy, who appeared on Charlie Rose. According to Mr. Peterson it is not greed and speculation that has reeked havoc on our economy for the past 30 years, it is the entitlement programs. All this time I have been thinking that not being able to know when you’ve had enough is the problem. Come to find out I am looking in the wrong direction. Greed has been around for a long time, entitlements have not. The Crash and the Depression occurred prior to entitlements; I wonder who Mr. Peterson blames those on.

The Associated Press reports over the weekend that Vytorin, a cholesterol-reducing drug made and marketed jointly by Merck and Schering-Plough, has little effect in improving heart disease. According to the article, the "study was watched closely because Zetia and Vytorin have racked up $5 billion in sales despite limited proof of benefit. [Italics mine.]

This is just so much more evil than one can imagine.

The breast cancer information I had came from a citizens petition by this group:  http://www.sustdev.org/...  

But now there is a law making it harder to file any citizens' petitions:

http://www.fdalawblog.net/...

It was pushed by this law firm

http://www.fdalawblog.net/...

which is connected to Rumsfeld and Searle and Monsanto.

http://www2.wabash.edu/...

And it is part of a law is one that threatens access to Big Pharma's competition: supplements, which Kennedy pushed:

http://www.lef.org/...

Yes, another fine cross post from Furious Seasons.

The state now becomes the tenth in a string of states suing the maker of Zyprexa. It's the usual set of allegations, as WSJ's Health  Blog notes, and then there is some eye-popping detail:

When does your weekend start? Friday night? Saturday?

I remember back to at least one job where "weekends" began on Thursday night, when a few folks from the corporate headquarters of the company where we worked would head out to a local dance club in a nearby hotel and spend a few hours burning off the week's insanity; Fridays were just much more relaxed after a night of friendship, fun and dance. We got a lot completed and could then get into the weekend proper without having to expend the first half of it unwinding from the toils of the week.

It was, in a sense, a kind of two-step.

With that in mind, I thought I'd remind folks to check out what's been happening over on ePluribus Media: we've had a few pieces that you might find interesting, informative and entertaining.

I have permission to post the following unpublished article by another author.

Bill Maher went on a rant about prescription drugs on Friday. He has a lot of great opinions and a lot of very honest assessments. He is independent enough that I don't agree with him on everything.

I like what he says about eating and wearing animals, though I am not a PETA member. Also, I don't believe in a "give away everything but the kitchen sink" approach to terrorist attacks, but I like his honesty about living by the Port of L.A.

A cross post from Furious Seasons.

Pardon my really sarcastic attitude for a moment, but how the hell else does one properly reply to the inanity of federal regulatory agencies when it is pressed right in your face. Yet again.

The majoriy of kossacks are old enough to remember when our country had "Regulation". Republicans, Centrists, and BigBiz shudder at that word, and with good reason. Just a quick glance back at the past year when our Pets were poisoned, our Produce was poison, and what seemed like 90% of all the kids toys were found toxic shows how corners have been cut because of the lack of "Regulation". What is refreshing  is to read about someone doing what is right.
 

Welcome to the world of market regulation, and to the Commission's intrepid strike force of dawn raiders.

The raids, early on Wednesday, were launched from Brussels to investigate whether big drug companies were fixing the market to squeeze out copycat medicines. They included forays on Pfizer, Merck, Bayer Schering Pharma and Roche as well as generic firms such as Teva and Sandoz. Hours later, with almost ironic understatement, the E.U. competition watchdog said it had merely launched a "sector inquiry into pharmaceuticals with unannounced inspections."

http://www.time.com/...

A cross posting from Furious Seasons.

An important study is out today in the New England Journal of Medicine pretty much confirming what many of us have been saying the 'Net for ages, which is that a whole slew of pharma companies hid data about negative results from anti-depressants from the public and doctors going all the way back to 1987.

In the richest country on the planet . . .

My once solidly middle class friend called to tell me she's going naked.

She doesn't want to "go naked", she's got no choice. She left me a message, she knows  writing  about our healthcare catastrophe has become my almost full-time job. Her voice was quiet, she sadly referred to me as "Nice Eve."

She said, "Nice Eve, you're not going to like this. I'm going naked, I've got no choice, they're raising my rates--again. I Just don't have the scratch. I'm gonna take my chances. I know we'll elect a Democrat. This can't go on."

I called her back and left a message. We haven't connected yet.

"To go naked."  You know what it means now, right? It's  when a supposedly insured American, has to dump their health insurance coverage because the premium costs are simply unsustainable. It's called "going naked."

I relate to that. I'm paying $7557.96 a year.

When oil hits $150.00 a barrel and an individual health insurance policy hits $1000.00 a month, maybe someone will get serious.

By L.C. Johnson (blog/bio)

It has to be drugs.  How else do we explain Senator Obama decrying the influence of lobbyists--health care lobbyists in particular--and then putting one of those very lobbyists in as his New Hampshire campaign chair?  Are all Obama supporters just a bunch of Jim Jones kool aid drinkers or does this blatant hypocrisy cause you to question the commitment of Senator Obama to produce real change in Washington?

There is no way to spin this.  The facts are simple.  Here's what the good Senator said in Augustabout those dastardly pharmaceutical and healthcare lobbyists:

This is a post I did on my own site, www.furiousseasons.com, a couple of weeks ago.

The Census Bureau yesterday released its 2008 Statistical Abstract of the United States, a publication that is almost always fascinating for what it tells America about itself by the numbers. Pharmaceutical drugs stand out in the new abstract--which if you've never read, I suggest that you look it over sometime online or at the library because it is nothing if not revealing--but then if you read this site, then that's probably not a shocker. Some numbers: