As a Harvard grad, former Princeton professor, and the son of a respected rabbi, Ethan Nadelmann might seem like an unlikely advocate for legalizing marijuana. But when you meet him, it all makes a lot of sense.
David Lyons, Newsweek, 15 October 2009
The idea is not that drugs are good but that prohibition is bad. Nadelmann argues that marijuana prohibition is as counterproductive as alcohol prohibition was in the 1920s, and that we'd all be better off if the government would just regulate and tax it. Ironically, this would give the government more control over the drug, not less.
When patients visit a physician or hospital, they know that anyone involved in providing their health care can lawfully see their medical records. But unknown to patients, an increasing number of outside vendors that manage electronic health records also have access to that data, and are reselling the information as a commodity. …
The President says the Constitution is defective, and now Senator Harry Reid is preparing the coup de grace. Once Reid and Obama emerge from their transparent closed-door consultations on how to blend the two competing Senate Health Care bills, Senator Reid has a nifty parlor trick up his sleeve. . . . . . .The plan to railroad Obamacare through was initially reported last week by Huma! n Events and The Heritage Foundation, and has now been confirmed by Senator Reid's office.Here is Senator Reid's plan in a nutshell, from CNS News: A senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told CNSNews.com that it is “likely” that Reid will use H.R. 1586-a bill passed by the House in March to impose a 90-percent tax on bonuses paid to employees of certain bailed-out financial institutions-as a “shell” for enacting the final version of the Senate's health care bill, which Reid is responsible for crafting.The rub here, and the reason Senator Reid has conjured up his little parlor trick, is the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 7: All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
. . . . . . .
While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
Below is a simple illsutration of what a proper national health policy should address.
Printable Powerpoint Slide (1997-2003) with Notes
This illustration is freely available under Creative Commons non-commercial license except that media outlets are gladly given a waiver and may make free use with attribution to “Phi Beta Iota, Public Intelligence Blog.”
Below is a simplified question and four-point answer that any serious person should be able to comprehend.
The unemployment rate as I write is inching toward 10 percent nationally, and that is only counting people who were still looking for a job recently. A vast bank robbery by the corrupt on Wall Street has deprived them of the credit that made the economy go. Labor Day was passed by Congress under Grover Cleveland to celebrate not only the individual American laborer but the labor movement– yes, unions, workers' parades, hard hats and blue jeans (before the youth movement of the 1960s appropriated them, blue jeans were working class clothing, and my working class relatives upbraided me for wearing them as an undergraduate). It is to celebrate all those icons that shills for the barracuda billionaires, such as Glenn Beck, now castigate as “fascist” and “communist.” It is to celebrate what Carl Sandberg did in his poem, “Chicago:”
Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders;
And of course, the home-makers and retail workers who move the manufactured goods and the teachers are all doing the hard foundational work as well.
Who is not working are the Wall Street thieves who have largely gone unpunished or been actively rewarded for their peculation.
Now Americans have convinced themselves that we don't have a working class. Everybody is middle class, even those who make minimum wage in the fast food industry, or those who are kept as part-timers so that the store (I'm looking at you, Walmart) doesn't have to enroll them in a health care program.
What’s the financial argument? You reap $7 dollars in economic rewards for every dollar you spend in basic sanitation. That makes it a really, really good investment. In the developing world, it may cost a couple hundred dollars to install a decent latrine, but think of what you save in terms of health costs and what you would otherwise lose when your workers are off with dysentery or whatever. And in developed world we’re learning that if you don’t continue investing in infrastructure you just going to pay a lot more later. It’s that simple.
Author Rose GeorgeAmazon Page
We have added this site to the Righteous Site blogroll. There are gems–and humor, throughout–that reflect a remarkable public intelligence in relation to national infrastructure.
What is clear is that “the numbers” that are presented to the public for any given public works project are those that favor the decision that has already been made, one based on corporate numbers that seek to spend public funds to create capabilities that extract profit from the public at public expense.
Public intelligence is how we get government back into the business of sserving the public rather than serving as the wealth transfer mechanism from individual taxation to corporate profiteering.
