In Its Last Throes
What a terrible sight it is, watching the 'last throes' of a monopoly on power. Trying to wrest away the last opportunities to defeat the public interest, the WH is spreading ruin as fast as it can before the investigatory process sets in.
The Dark Lord goes about his usual spreading of hate among the Base, telling them that those dying in Iraq have the liberals and the internet to blame:
US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that insurgents in Iraq have increased their attacks in order to influence the upcoming US mid-term elections.
He blamed a recent rise in violence on al-Qaeda and others trying to "break the will of the American people".
************************************************
Speaking in an interview with Fox News, Mr Cheney said that insurgents were using the internet to time their attacks, although he did not provide any evidence to that effect.
"There isn't anything that's on the internet that's not accessible to them. They're on it all the time. They're very sophisticated users of it," Mr Cheney said.
The Iraqi situation of course defies all the White House efforts to domesticate it, and continues to be the proverbial tiger caught by the tail. Saddam Hussein is condemned to die by hanging and the world holds its breath knowing the storm is going to follow. Look at it this way; we are ignoring the inaccessible Osama bin Laden (been forgotten) and going after our straw dog, the GWOT only a pretense to hit out at arbitrarily chosen targets. And so Saddam must die. Would I have left him alone, a war criminal, why yes. I would have spared the almost 3,000 American, estimated 650,000 Iraqis dead, and the hundreds of thousands now refugees in neighboring countries, with the resultant impact on those countries.
And in Iraq, are those citizens we're supposedly sacrificing lives and our economic stability as a nation, to protect, profiting from the war?
BBC visited Sadr City, the Shiite slum, where pacification has repeatedly been tried, and failed.
Some areas of Sadr City have been transformed by American military engineers, who have installed entirely new main sewers and more than two dozen reverse-osmosis water-treatment filters in primary schools.
An American colonel who showed me some examples of this undeniably successful reconstruction urged me to ask local people, "who provides your security?", hoping the answer would be "the police" or "the Iraqi Army".
But when I reassured them they could tell the truth, the most common reply was "the Mehdi Army".
The war on the American public and on Iraq, though, are not the greatest threat over the long term. The destruction of the environment, and of public health and safety, are to my mind more dangerous. Global warming, which even this White House has been forced to confront, has grown in imminent threat over the past six years. European concern is leading to action in the civilized world.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel had talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London on November 3 in which the two agreed to put global warming at the top of the international agenda.
Blair said he was hopeful that the United States is becoming more ready to confront the threat.
Germany is due to take an international lead in combating climate change when it takes over the presidencies of the Group of Eight industrialized states (G8) and the European Union in January.
Administration laying waste of our own environment here in the US proceeds apace.
Superfund’s plight threatens public health across the country. One in four Americans live within three miles of a Superfund site, and approximately three to four million children, who face developmental risks from exposure to environmental contaminants, live within one mile. Over the last decade, cleanups have slowed to a crawl because the program lost its stable “polluter pays” funding base in 1995. A series of Republican-controlled Congresses allowed the industry taxes that support the program to expire and ignored yearly requests by the Clinton administration to reinstate them.
When President George W. Bush took office, the principle that polluters need not pay went from de facto to official public policy. In the absence of political commitment and resources, the number of completed Superfund cleanups fell abruptly in 2001 to 50 percent of previous annual totals. Cleanups were completed at just 40 sites in each of the last three years.
The official sanctions that shift cleanups of the environment from the industrial polluters to the public is another shift of tax burdens to the populace from the administration and its industrial supporters.
Our vaunted health care standing has been hit very hard by the administration and its continued authority over the field is becoming increasingly dangerous. The next two years of lame duck status are a threat.
The leadership does not get the message….For a decade, they've [the FDA] had problems, and they've done very little. They deny their problems, and they can't fix them. We're saying Congress has to step in to give them authority, give them money, oversee their operations and make sure drug safety is a priority.”
This criticism comes from a collection of experts that the FDA assembled to give them advice on the safety of drugs. Numerous experts on the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee felt the FDA was not following their advice regarding needed drug-safety improvements. The message is loud and clear: The FDA, an agency that maintains a cozy and profitable relationship with Big Pharma, is incapable of protecting the American public from harm.
*********************************************
The FDA was shocked when earlier this year the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee voted 8 to 7 to place a black box warning for cardiovascular risk on all ADHD medications. Such a move would cost Big Pharma dearly, eroding the ten billion dollar children’s market in ADHD meds, antidepressants, and atypical antipsychotic meds. Americans are worried, and rightfully so, that the true risks of these medications are being hidden and downplayed thus placing an entire generation of children in danger.
How much damage does the tiger do when you finally let go of its tail? I fear it will take the coming Democratic leadership a long time to get this back under control.
Tuesday is time to start repairing the rips and tears this regime has been making in the fabric of our stability and wellbeing.
The Dark Lord goes about his usual spreading of hate among the Base, telling them that those dying in Iraq have the liberals and the internet to blame:
US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that insurgents in Iraq have increased their attacks in order to influence the upcoming US mid-term elections.
He blamed a recent rise in violence on al-Qaeda and others trying to "break the will of the American people".
************************************************
Speaking in an interview with Fox News, Mr Cheney said that insurgents were using the internet to time their attacks, although he did not provide any evidence to that effect.
"There isn't anything that's on the internet that's not accessible to them. They're on it all the time. They're very sophisticated users of it," Mr Cheney said.
The Iraqi situation of course defies all the White House efforts to domesticate it, and continues to be the proverbial tiger caught by the tail. Saddam Hussein is condemned to die by hanging and the world holds its breath knowing the storm is going to follow. Look at it this way; we are ignoring the inaccessible Osama bin Laden (been forgotten) and going after our straw dog, the GWOT only a pretense to hit out at arbitrarily chosen targets. And so Saddam must die. Would I have left him alone, a war criminal, why yes. I would have spared the almost 3,000 American, estimated 650,000 Iraqis dead, and the hundreds of thousands now refugees in neighboring countries, with the resultant impact on those countries.
And in Iraq, are those citizens we're supposedly sacrificing lives and our economic stability as a nation, to protect, profiting from the war?
BBC visited Sadr City, the Shiite slum, where pacification has repeatedly been tried, and failed.
Some areas of Sadr City have been transformed by American military engineers, who have installed entirely new main sewers and more than two dozen reverse-osmosis water-treatment filters in primary schools.
An American colonel who showed me some examples of this undeniably successful reconstruction urged me to ask local people, "who provides your security?", hoping the answer would be "the police" or "the Iraqi Army".
But when I reassured them they could tell the truth, the most common reply was "the Mehdi Army".
The war on the American public and on Iraq, though, are not the greatest threat over the long term. The destruction of the environment, and of public health and safety, are to my mind more dangerous. Global warming, which even this White House has been forced to confront, has grown in imminent threat over the past six years. European concern is leading to action in the civilized world.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel had talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London on November 3 in which the two agreed to put global warming at the top of the international agenda.
Blair said he was hopeful that the United States is becoming more ready to confront the threat.
Germany is due to take an international lead in combating climate change when it takes over the presidencies of the Group of Eight industrialized states (G8) and the European Union in January.
Administration laying waste of our own environment here in the US proceeds apace.
Superfund’s plight threatens public health across the country. One in four Americans live within three miles of a Superfund site, and approximately three to four million children, who face developmental risks from exposure to environmental contaminants, live within one mile. Over the last decade, cleanups have slowed to a crawl because the program lost its stable “polluter pays” funding base in 1995. A series of Republican-controlled Congresses allowed the industry taxes that support the program to expire and ignored yearly requests by the Clinton administration to reinstate them.
When President George W. Bush took office, the principle that polluters need not pay went from de facto to official public policy. In the absence of political commitment and resources, the number of completed Superfund cleanups fell abruptly in 2001 to 50 percent of previous annual totals. Cleanups were completed at just 40 sites in each of the last three years.
The official sanctions that shift cleanups of the environment from the industrial polluters to the public is another shift of tax burdens to the populace from the administration and its industrial supporters.
Our vaunted health care standing has been hit very hard by the administration and its continued authority over the field is becoming increasingly dangerous. The next two years of lame duck status are a threat.
The leadership does not get the message….For a decade, they've [the FDA] had problems, and they've done very little. They deny their problems, and they can't fix them. We're saying Congress has to step in to give them authority, give them money, oversee their operations and make sure drug safety is a priority.”
This criticism comes from a collection of experts that the FDA assembled to give them advice on the safety of drugs. Numerous experts on the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee felt the FDA was not following their advice regarding needed drug-safety improvements. The message is loud and clear: The FDA, an agency that maintains a cozy and profitable relationship with Big Pharma, is incapable of protecting the American public from harm.
*********************************************
The FDA was shocked when earlier this year the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee voted 8 to 7 to place a black box warning for cardiovascular risk on all ADHD medications. Such a move would cost Big Pharma dearly, eroding the ten billion dollar children’s market in ADHD meds, antidepressants, and atypical antipsychotic meds. Americans are worried, and rightfully so, that the true risks of these medications are being hidden and downplayed thus placing an entire generation of children in danger.
How much damage does the tiger do when you finally let go of its tail? I fear it will take the coming Democratic leadership a long time to get this back under control.
Tuesday is time to start repairing the rips and tears this regime has been making in the fabric of our stability and wellbeing.
Labels: EPA, FDA, Global Warming, Iraq War
posted by Ruth at 8:26 AM
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