Last week an FDA advisory panel announced a 6-0 decision to stop recommending the drug Avastin for breast cancer, saying exhaustive clinical trials have not shown it to be effective and that relatively common side effects – like blood clots and high blood pressure – are not worth its continued use. The reaction to the decision has been mixed, with many breast cancer advocacy groups supportive, saying – in effect – let’s use something that works instead. However, Faux News immediately seized upon this decision as evidence of health care rationing under Obama’s health care program, as it did when the preliminary decision was announced last year, once again highlighting its role as the lead media outlet for the anti-Obama forces in the country and republican party bomb-throwers. What continues to be hard to get my head around is why on earth anyone would believe them about anything. Do they really want desperate women using a drug which is dangerous and doesn’t work?
The automatic opposition to any policy having to do with global warming issues, regulation of the financial markets, regulation of industry or taxation is so utterly predictable that it has long since ceased to surprise. It’s the continual, insipid arguments used to justify the opposition though, that do have the capacity to make you shake your head in a mixture of admiration for their brazenness and sad resignation that these essentially untenable, un-defendable positions are accepted for a large part of the voting population.
Thousands of scientists – men and women who have devoted their lives to their work, who have Ph.d’s and vast experience and reams of information derived from experiments and carefully recorded observations – world wide – agree that global warming is real and caused by humans. It is well over 90% of scientists that agree on this fundamental notion. They may disagree on some specifics but the causal relationship between human, carbon using activity and what can only be described as catastrophic climate change is really no longer in serious doubt. Yet much of the mainstream media and the chuckleheads at Faux News in particular continue to serve the interests of the polluters, treating trumped up deniers as if they are a valid, opposing point of view – like creationists – instead of the self-serving apologists and anti-science knuckle-draggers that they are. Look around, people; the evidence is everywhere. 10 of the hottest 14 years in history have been in the last decade. Take it to the bank and get some waders…
Within a few days of the unthinkably disastrous explosion in the Gulf last year, Obama called for a moratorium on new permits and leases for deep water drilling until there was time to figure out what the hell happened to kill a dozen men and profoundly pollute the Gulf of Mexico. Immediately the republicans were bitching about him costing the Gulf Coast jobs by doing so and warning ominously that additional regulation would end up making all the rigs move to Nigeria or Trinidad or the Sea of Tranquility. Gee fellas, did you seriously think we shouldn’t take a month or so and go over the data and try to make sure it didn’t happen again. How would a second spill have impacted jobs, ya think?
Now, as the president impatiently taps his toe waiting for 535 people to do their jobs and make sure the government can keep running after August 1, the Tea-party intoxicated elephants are fighting to get themselves to the front of the mosh pit to scream, “No taxes! No taxes! No taxes!” Never mind that this supposedly populist groundswell protesting taking away tax breaks for corporate jets and oil companies and hedge fund managers swimming in profits doesn’t affect the average person in a negative way at all. Does the average voter care more about some obscene, bloated oil company profits than how many teachers are at their kids’ school? Do they really buy the Faux News fairy tale that doing so will cost the country jobs – that these corporations are job creating engines that need to be completely unburdened by taxes or they will take their jobs elsewhere? Don’t they realize that that’s what the big corporations are doing anyway? The republican calculus is really simple if you think about it; everyone hates taxes and those people who are bleeding the most from a thousand cuts hate them more than most. So “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” prevails, making heroes of blowhard shills like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, who have to stand up and, with a straight face, defend the surreal position that the same corporations that have been shipping jobs overseas for the past 10 year with impunity need the help of Joe and Marge Suburb or they’ll perish. What utter nonsense…
Finally, to the financial markets; it’s clear to see that the crisis was the result of a combination of lax regulation and adrenaline fueled Wall Street speculation. But somehow we have forgotten. As Paul Krugman recently wrote, “Month by month, the discourse has gotten more primitive; with stunning speed, the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis have been forgotten, and the very ideas that got us into the crisis — regulation is always bad, what’s good for the bankers is good for America, tax cuts are the universal elixir — have regained their hold.” How can the average person believe this? Are we a country of dullards and simpletons with memories incapable of remembering what happened only 3 short years ago? How can that be…?
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