There Already Is A Government Health Care System In America And It Is The Medical Version Of Hell

by Michael Snyder

What would happen if the entire health care system in the United States was run by the federal government?? Would such a system be better or worse than what we have today?? To get an answer to these questions, all we have to do is take a look at what is already happening.? The truth is that there already is a government health care system in America and it is the medical version of hell.? You are about to read about the horrifying state of health care being provided by the federal government at VA hospitals and on Indian reservations around the country.? Injured military veterans and those that live on Indian reservations are some of the most vulnerable members of our society, and the government is doing an absolutely nightmarish job of taking care of them.

Theoretically, the government should be able to provide at least a basic level of care for these people, but as you will see this is simply not happening.

Why?

The bottom line is that the federal government is completely and utterly incompetent.? This has been demonstrated once again in recent months by the launch of Obamacare.? What a train wreck that has been.

But we shouldn?t be surprised.? When it comes to health care, the U.S. government can?t seem to get anything right.

Most Americans don?t realize this, but government-run health care for our military veterans is a complete and total joke.? In some instances, it can take critically injured military veterans?more than a year to see a doctor?

CJ Jackson, a Purple Heart recipient and 101st Airborne medic, was severely wounded during a battle in Afghanistan when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade hit a wall a couple of feet from him, sending debris into his arm and leg. He said he waited over a year to see a doctor at the Jackson VA despite being considered critically injured.

And once a vet is finally able to see a doctor and have surgery scheduled, those surgeries are often conducted in facilities that are beyond disgusting.? The following is what one orthopedic surgeon recently told CNBC?

?Occasionally we?d find pieces of bone? on equipment, he told CNBC. ?What it really shows is that no one is really taking the time or care to clean the instruments.?

His story was backed up by Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, who still works at the hospital. She testified on Sept. 9 about problems at the Jackson center. ?Essentially everything that happens in primary care at the Jackson VA can be included under the umbrella of being unethical, illegal, heartbreaking, and life threatening for the veterans, and everything in the care of the veterans starts in primary care.?

Of course this is not the first investigation that discovered these kinds of conditions at VA hospitals.? A few years ago, ABC News also conducted an investigation of conditions at VA facilities across the United States.? What ABC News discovered was absolutely staggering.? The following are just a few of the things that they found during the course of their investigation...

*Bathrooms filthy with what appeared to be human excrement

*Dirty linens from some patients mixed in with clean supplies

*Examining tables that had dried blood and medications still on them

*Equipment used to sterilize surgical instruments that had broken down

*Some patients that were begging for food and water

*Vets neglected so badly that they had developed horrific bedsores and dangerous infections

Is this how the federal government should be treating the men and women that have shed blood fighting for our country?

Unfortunately, it appears that the mistreatment of our military veterans has gotten even worse since Barack Obama took power.? For much more on all of this, please see my previous article entitled ?25 Signs That Military Veterans Are Being Treated Like Absolute Trash Under The Obama Administration?.

The funny thing is that many of the people that run these VA facilities are greatly rewarded for their ?hard work?.? For example,?CNBC discovered that those running the VA facility in Jackson, Mississippi described above are receiving huge bonuses?

The director of the Jackson VA, Joe Battle, received a $6,500 bonus last year on top of his $165,000 salary, and Rica Lewis-Payton, the network director of the South Central Health Care Network, which includes Jackson, got almost $36,000 in bonuses last year, on top of her $180,000 salary.

Are you disgusted yet?

You should be.

And we see the exact same thing happening in government-run health care facilities on Indian reservations.

By treaty, the U.S. government is required to provide health care on Indian reservations.? But the level of health care being provided is of extremely low quality and the programs are very underfunded.

In fact, things are so bad that the following expression is very commonly heard on Indian reservations across America?

?Don't get sick after June?.

Why would they say that?

Well, because in the fall and winter the waits to see a doctor and the rationing of care get particularly bad.? If you get seriously ill, you might end up dying before you ever get the care that you need.

Posted below is a?video news report featuring Judge Andrew Napolitano about the horrific state of government-run health care on Indian reservations?

In light of all of this, should we have more government interference in the health care system or less?

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How Medical Innovation Redefines Our World

Jeffrey Tucker

On a Sunday afternoon swim, a 6-year-old boy was bugging me in a sweet sort of way. He rode up and down the handrail on the stairs in the shallow end of the pool where I was trying to sit in peace. He was laughing and talking, but I couldn't understand a word through the giggles.

I spoke to him to try to engage him in conversation.

His mother was sitting on the side of pool and said to me, "He can't hear a word you are saying."

I thought by that she meant that when he is having fun, he is not interested in adult conversation. So I laughed and tried again. She clarified what she meant: He is completely deaf. Literally, he can't hear anything.

I felt embarrassed.

But then she added something that amazed and surprised me. She said that when he is not swimming, he wears equipment that allows him to hear completely normally. He just has to take off the equipment for the water.

I asked for details, simply because, for whatever reason, I hadn't really known about this technology. As she explained, the boy's disability became apparent in the first few weeks of his life. In any other era, he would never have heard a sound. Fortunately, starting in the year 2000, implants became available for children. The ear implants that give him hearing came after about six months. Since then, he has heard nearly as well as everyone else.

My jaw just dropped open. Here is a miracle of our time, a brilliant example of how technological progress isn't really about machines and efficiency, but about the quality and vibrancy of human life itself.

Deafness has been part of human life as far back as we can look in recorded history. It is mentioned by Aristotle, and Socrates was said to have addressed the issue. It is mentioned in Hebrew law and by the fathers of the Christian religion. It figured into folklore throughout the Middle Ages. Most of what was written and said treated deafness as a curse.

With growing enlightenment as to the nature of disability, we began to see real therapeutic efforts toward helping the deaf. In the 19th century, universities were founded. Languages were codified. Activists worked to have society treat deafness not as a wicked malady, but as a condition that comes with special gifts. A more humanitarian approach replaced age-old bias and even demonization.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. In our own time, vast numbers of deaf people have been given hearing, even from infancy. Technology changed everything. "Cochlear implants" became accessible to vast numbers of people. These small machines are put deep inside the ear to fix what is really just a small physical problem, and they are operated by sophisticated equipment that is barely visible.

It is today entirely possible that a deaf person will never know the fate of millions and millions of people throughout history, that of never hearing a song or the spoken world. The world has been opened up to them through the efforts of scientists and commercial providers over the course of some 50 years. As usual, when the solution arrives, people tend to forget the problem ever existed. That is where we are headed with deafness today.

As alert as I am to the surprises brought to us by market-based experimentation and innovation, learning of this genuinely surprised me. I suppose I had thought deafness was a permanent accident that humanity would always deal with. Before the late 19th century, people probably thought the same about infant mortality and hundreds of diseases that have since been cured. In the Middle Ages, it must have been this way with tooth pain, the pain of childbirth, and the inability to communicate with anyone outside your immediate vicinity.

All human problems seem intractable and perpetual when they are ever-present. But there are always a few among us who do not see problems this way. They see problems as rooted in the lack of some technological solution. And they get to work on a fix. Given time, given resources, given an open market in which to sell their fixes, they change history.

Work on fixing the problem of deafness through cochlear implants began in the 1950s, but no technology works out of the box. It takes learning and trying among many people who attempt marginal improvements, one bit at a time. Work picked up in the 1970s as the prospect of commercial viability of implants inspired more manufacturers to work with doctors and scientists.

As always, it took longer than it should have, but implants for adults were finally approved by the FDA in 1984. It wasn't until just 13 years ago, however, that the government approved them for use in children as young as 6 months old. Another factor that slowed down development, as always, was the patent, which essentially assigned a monopoly of knowledge to certain individual firms. Even now, the market is hobbled and the devices overly expensive because of them. In other words, without government intervention, we would have seen more progress sooner.

Even so, I was fascinated to see a real-life example of how science and commerce radically changes life itself. How many people would have even imagined such a thing 100 years ago? Very few. Here is a beautiful example of how allowing entrepreneurs to be free of restrictions gives rise to genius solutions to problems most everyone else thinks are permanent.

And there is a still a long way to go. Already, this nice family that I met is looking into getting the next edition of the implants the child is using, because the new version is actually waterproof. He will be able to swim and hear at the same time. There are still other factors that need improvement: battery life, cosmetic appearance, the stability of the machinery itself, etc. And everyone looks forward to the day when the entire apparatus can be implanted with no external operation at all. These times are not far off.

Oh, and by the way, the implants are all manufactured by those kinds of capitalistic institutions everyone loves to hate. There is Cochlear Limited in Australia, Advanced Bionics (in the U.S, but a division of a Swiss company), and Med-El in Austria.

All are for-profit enterprises.

As we think about such things ? seeming miracles accomplished through science and market entrepreneurship ? what can we say about today's anti-technology and socialist attitudes among the educated elite? The greens are habituated to be against all industrial progress. The neo-Luddites put down every advance. The socialists tell us that all solutions come from the public sector. Books and articles appear daily that tell us about the evils of technology and how it is ruining human community.

Meanwhile, people sneer at smartphones, gaming, and social media, and speak with trepidation about how Google Glass is going to turn us into cyborgs. The romantics long for a return to the simple life.

But do these people consider the lives of people such as this boy I met? Here is the truth: The return to the simple life means that deafness will not be cured. The simple life means pain, suffering, hunger, disease, malnutrition, early death, and the horror of struggling every day just to live another day. Every bit of the progress humanity has made over the state of nature is due to the unleashing of human creativity in the framework of an open society and an open market. This is the way to unleash the genius of innovative human service.

This is the path of progress. The path of regress is the opposite: command, regulate, control, coerce, and rule by those who imagine that they know what we need and construct a political order to impose it on us. Under such forms of political management, answers to intractable problems do not emerge through the regulatory thicket.

In the end, this is what is most scary about health care solutions like Obamacare. It is not so much how such political solutions misallocate existing resources. The real problem is how such systems lock down and control human creativity and end up preventing us from discovering what we currently do not know. They stop the emergence of seeming miracles such as tools to allow the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk again.

Might we someday truly find a cure for the remaining horrors in our world, such as cancer? It can happen, provided we have systems that are open to experimentation, commercial creativity, and trial and error. I met the living proof of this, a happy boy who will never know a world in which there was no solution for his disability.
_
Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, the Primus inter pares of the Laissez Faire Club, and the author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo, It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes, and A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Build Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age, among thousands of articles. Click to sign up for his free daily letter. Email him: tucker@lfb.org | Facebook | Twitter | Google

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Oklahoma Woman Seeks Medical Treatment, Is Jailed Instead, Dies

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A pregnant Oklahoma woman who went to a hospital seeking treatment for extreme pain was instead jailed after police found pain pills on her and died in jail shortly thereafter. Jamie Lynn Russell, 33, becomes the third person to die in US domestic drug law enforcement operations so far this year.

According to KFOR-TV News Channel 4 in Oklahoma City, Russell went to the hospital in Pauls Valley seeking help for severe abdominal pain. Hospital staff reported that Russell wouldn't cooperate and was in too much pain to even lie down, so they asked a Paul's Valley police officer to assist.

And that's when Russell's medical emergency morphed into a drug bust. The police officer found two prescription pills on her for which she did not have a prescription, so she was arrested and jailed on drug possession charges. She was found unresponsive in her cell less than two hours later.

"There is nothing my staff in the jail could?ve done differently,? Garvin County sheriff Larry Rhodes said. "She had a medical release from the hospital stating that she was fit for incarceration," Rhodes said. "It?s very regrettable for the family. My heart and prayers go out to them."

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation has cleared the jail staff of any criminal wrongdoing.

The state medical examiner's office later confirmed that Russell died from a ruptured ecoptic pregnancy, where the embryo implants outside the uterus.

Russell's friends and family are pointing the finger at the hospital. "Jamie was seeking help; she was in extreme pain," family friend Kemper Kimberlin told KFOR. "We want to see this come to light. Something's wrong and needs to be fixed."

It may take a civil wrongful death lawsuit to find out exactly what's wrong?and how a hospital can turn a pain-tormented woman over to police to be jailed instead of treated.

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In this society, there's nothing more important than enforcing the law. The most trivial and benign law violation, no victims, no damage, trumps any other consideration, human life included.

I can imagine that by the way things are arranged, neither police officer, nor hospital staff couldn't act differently without risking their own careers or maybe even their own liberty - once the pill was discovered.

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AG Holder Accused of Lying About Medical Marijuana Crackdown

by Phillip Smith

US Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday and defended his Justice Department's crackdown on medical marijuana cultivation and distribution. Holder told committee members the agency was only targeting only those medical marijuana businesses that were "acting out of conformity? with state law."

That had medical marijuana defenders up in arms at what they called his falsehoods. Advocates pointed to numerous dispensaries and other medical marijuana-related enterprises that were operating in compliance with state laws and with the support of local elected officials that have been raided by the DEA or subjected to other federal enforcement actions.

Holder's comments came in response to questioning from Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who pointed out that during his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had promised that he wouldn't use "Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue."

Holder agreed that the Justice Department had broken with Bush administration policy and promised not to go after people operating in compliance with state laws. But large-scale growers and dispensaries have "come up with ways in which they are taking advantage of these state laws and going beyond that which the states have authorized," Holder added. "Those are the only cases we've being going after."

Nadler pointed out that since 2009, the DEA and federal prosecutors have raided almost 200 dispensaries and growers and indicted more than 60 medical marijuana providers on federal drug charges and again asked Holder to clarify.

Holder responded that the Justice Department is only going after "those individuals (and) organizations that are acting out of conformity... with state laws."

Holder added, however, that in some cases, mainly in Colorado, the department was also targeting dispensaries located "too close" to schools. Those enforcement actions were taken not because the dispensaries were violating state laws, but because they were inside the 1,000-foot range specified by an enhanced federal sentencing statute.

Holder "lied to the House Judiciary Committee" in saying the Justice Department was only going after dispensaries and growers that were not in compliance with state laws," California NORML (CANORML) retorted bluntly. "The Justice Department's bad faith seriously impugns the credibility and competence of Attorney General Holder and his administration."

Steph Sherer, executive director of Americans for Safe Access (ASA), was only slightly more politic.

"What he said to our congressional representatives should be alarming not only to medical cannabis patients, but also to policymakers and the general public, because, based on all of the available information we have, it surely must be a lie," she wrote on the Huffington Post.

The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) was a bit more diplomatic.

"The problem with Holder's statements is that the federal government's determination of compliance with state law is still fairly ambiguous, even arbitrary," MPP spokesman Morgan Fox told the Chronicle. "This makes it difficult for medical marijuana providers to know if they are safe, creating a chilling effect on the entire industry and resulting in pain, suffering, and potential danger for patients forced to resort to the illicit market."

The states should decide whether a dispensary is violating state law, he added.

"At the end of the day, it should be state authorities who determine if operators are in compliance with state law, not federal prosecutors who view the entire industry through a filter of illegality," Fox said. "Beyond that, using any federal resources to interfere with medical marijuana in states where it is legal is an inexcusable waste when there are far more serious problems that need attention."

CANORML was quick to point to a long list of California medical marijuana facilities that had been raided, threatened, or driven out of business by federal enforcers despite having sterling reputations, local official support, and complying with state laws and local regulations. Among them are many well-known and -respected operations including the Berkeley Patients Group, the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana, Richard Lee's Oaksterdam University and Blue Sky Coffee Shop, Mendocino County's Northstone Organics, and at least five San Francisco dispensaries, including the Vapor Room, Hope Net, Divinity Tree, Shambhala, and Medithrive.

CANORML noted that in all of those cases, local officials denounced the Justice Department enforcement actions, "but US Attorneys have insolently disregarded community sentiment."

And that's just in Northern California. US Attorneys in other parts of the state have been equally -- if not more -- active in going after medical marijuana providers. Just one day before Holder addressed the committee, federal prosecutors in Southern California announced a crackdown on Los Angeles County dispensaries, with the DEA raiding two dispensaries and federal prosecutors sending threat letters to 34 more.

The statewide crackdown has been ongoing since last October, when the state's four US Attorneys jointly announced their campaign to rein in the industry. According to ASA, the federal actions have forced more than 300 medical marijuana operations to shut down.

"It's simply not believable that all of these taxpaying businesses were operating in violation of state law," Sherer noted, before asking a series of pointed questions. "If they were, why didn't the state take part in the raids? Why didn't the state or local authorities issue arrest warrants? Why would state and local politicians stand up for businesses breaking state and local laws?"

And stand up they have. Local elected officials, state representatives, state officials, even California Attorney General Kamala Harris have all urged the feds to butt out. Harris wrote to all four US Attorneys in December, telling them the federal government was "ill-equipped" to interpret and enforce state medical marijuana laws.

The fight continues. On Wednesday, the same day the feds announced a new phase of their offensive in Southern California and the same day President Obama visited the Bay Area on a fundraising trip, three San Francisco supervisors wrote an op-ed asking him to "keep the commitment he made to stop the federal government's attacks on medical cannabis."

For medical marijuana advocates, listening to Attorney General Holder saying he is only targeting operations in violation of state laws is bringing back memories of that old country and western music song: "Who are You Gonna Believe? Me or Your Lying Eyes?"

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Obama and Eric Holder Are Still Lying About the Medical Marijuana Raids

by Scott Morgan

On Thursday, Eric Holder lied to Congress about DOJ's escalating attacks against medical marijuana:

Mr. Holder said federal officials are not going after those who are staying within the confines of their states' medical marijuana laws, but said some have "come up with ways in which they are taking advantage of these state laws."

"We limit our enforcement efforts to those individuals, organizations that are acting out of conformity with state law," Mr. Holder told a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing. [Washington Times]

That statement is simply false, and flagrantly so. It's been widely reported in the press that federal prosecutors have threatened to arrest state officials merely for administering their own medical marijuana laws. One cannot claim that regulators performing their official duties are "acting out of conformity with state law". They are the state. You can't threaten them with arrest and then subsequently claim that enforcement is only directed at those who violate local laws.

Moreover, the feds have raided hundreds of dispensaries without making any effort at all to determine whether state laws are being violated. Most of the time, they're just confiscating money and medicine without even charging anyone. They keep saying the people they raid were breaking local laws, but they aren't proving that to be the case. When have they ever demonstrated that any of these businesses were violating state laws?

This whole just-enforcing-state-laws excuse is the same nonsense we were hearing from the President a month ago, and the Obama Administration's ability to comfortably repeat this crap owes much to the media's total failure to follow up on it.

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Even if the feds really were enforcing State Law, do they even have jurisdiction to do that? If the State law was violated, wouldn't the State's police be the ones to enforce that law?
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The County Sheriff is the highest law enforcement authority. I believe the Sheriff could tell the DEA (ATF, TSA, all of them) to stay out of his/her county. Not that the Federal agencies would listen.

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Obama Defends War on Medical Marijuana With Lame Excuses

by Scott Morgan

Finally, finally, finally, someone in the press has managed to corner the President on the question of why the war on medical marijuana is getting worse under his watch. Here you go folks, the answer we've been waiting for?

Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not "use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana." Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What's up with that?

Here's what's up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana ? and the reason is, because it's against federal law. I can't nullify congressional law. I can't ask the Justice Department to say, "Ignore completely a federal law that's on the books." What I can say is, "Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage." As a consequence, there haven't been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes. [Rolling Stone]

I don't know how one could fairly characterize this as anything other than complete nonsense. Obama wants credit for stopping the arrests of medical marijuana users, which is just ridiculous on it's face. It's not like the federal government was bringing misdemeanor possession cases against sick grandmas until Obama came along. That was never the issue and he knows it.

This is a debate about whether the federal government should be stomping on state-regulated medical marijuana programs, thwarting the will of voters, prosecuting responsible providers, and depriving patients of access to their medicine. The President said, "I will not be using justice department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue," and that statement was made in response to repeated questions about whether the Obama Administration would continue the deeply unpopular dispensary raids that began under Bush. Nobody thought he talking about something else.

Obama deliberately led everyone to believe that his DOJ would stop targeting facilities that operated legally under state law. That's why everyone is pissed off that the raids haven't stopped. If I misinterpreted his words, then so did most of the marijuana reform movement, the entire American press, and several state legislatures. When the Obama Administration's pledge to respect state laws was making front-page headlines, they sure as hell didn't speak up to clarify that they'd meant no such thing.

Adding insult to injury, Obama then digs in deeper by randomly suggesting that the businesses they're raiding might actually be violating state laws after all:

The only tension that's come up ? and this gets hyped up a lot ? is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we're telling them, "This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way." That's not something we're going to do.

For the millionth time, if they're breaking state laws, then they can and should be prosecuted by the state. None of this amounts to any remote justification for federal intervention, but moreover, we know this is garbage anyway because they've targeted numerous businesses that were considered models of effective local regulation. The President is implying that these people deserved what they got, which is outrageous.

Think about this: federal prosecutors have even threatened to charge state employees simply for working to ensure legal compliance by licensed medical marijuana businesses. Obama claims to be concerned about illegal recreational sales, while his agents have been actively threatening to arrest the very people whose job it is to prevent that sort of thing. It's nuts. Everything he's saying is horribly disingenuous at best, and anyone who's followed the issue at all ought to see right through it.

Obama's comments today are a fresh story and I don?t know yet how others will react, but as far as I'm concerned, this matter is very far from resolved. The President's answers should give rise to more questions, not less. As long as the war on medical marijuana in America continues, those responsible should be able and willing to defend their actions. If Obama can't give us a straight answer, or even acknowledge the promises he broke before our eyes, then it's our job to keep making noise until he does.

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just don't vote for Obama again. He's a disaster.

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DEA investigates Montana state legislator for medical marijuana views

By Eric Pfeiffer | The Sideshow

A member of Montana's state legislature says the Drug Enforcement Agency began investigating her over support for medical marijuana laws.

State House Democrat Diane Sands tells the Missoulian she was contacted by a defense attorney with some unusual news: The attorney had been approached by the DEA who wanted to know whether Sands might be connected to one of the attorney's clients who had been charged with distributing marijuana.

"So now, if you're a state legislator who has been working on medical marijuana laws, you are somehow part of a conspiracy," said Sands. "It's ridiculous, of course, but it's also threatening to think that the federal government is willing to use its influence and try to chill discussion about this subject."

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Medical and legal experts launch new call for an inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly

*** Amid new calls for an inquest into the death of WMD expert Dr Kelly, certain sections of the media are promoting suggestions that Iraqi agents could have been responsible, citing an official source at a UN agency with known links to US/UK intelligence agencies. However, an operation by Iraqi agents is extremely unlikely, and would not explain why it was made to look like suicide. If Iraqi agents were responsible, this also does not explain why the spurious suicide conclusion was reached by the Hutton inquiry, or why the UK authorities actively concealed evidence and staged a cover-up. ***

New call for Dr David Kelly inquest

A group of experts have renewed calls for a formal inquest into the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly.

They say the official cause of death - a haemorrhage - was "extremely unlikely" in the light of new evidence.

The claim comes in a letter from eight senior figures, including a coroner, published in the Times newspaper.

Dr Kelly's body was found in 2003 near his Oxfordshire home after he was exposed as the source of a BBC story on the grounds for going to war in Iraq.

Instead of a coroner's inquest, then Prime Minister Tony Blair asked Lord Hutton to conduct an investigation, which found Dr Kelly committed suicide.

Lord Hutton's inquiry found the 59-year-old died from blood loss after slashing his wrist with a blunt gardening knife.

The letter's signatories include a former coroner, Michael Powers, a former deputy coroner, Margaret Bloom, and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.

They say Lord Hutton's conclusion is unsafe. They argue that a severed ulnar artery, the wound found to Dr Kelly's wrist, was unlikely to be life-threatening unless an individual had a blood-clotting deficiency.

"Insufficient blood would have been lost to threaten life," they write.

"Absent a quantitative assessment of the blood lost and of the blood remaining in the great vessels, the conclusion that death occurred as a consequence of haemorrhage is unsafe."

SOURCE

BBC News, "New call for Dr David Kelly inquest", 13 August 2010.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10961016

"The Insider" mailing list article, 14 August 2010.

View the original article here

Remember When Obama Said He Would Stop the DEA's Raids on Oregon's Medical Marijuana Growers? Neither Does He.

Jacob Sullum | October 7, 2011

In March 2008 Gary Nelson, editorial page editor at southern Oregon's Mail Tribune, interviewed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who at the time was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. When Nelson asked Obama about federal policy regarding Oregon's medical marijuana law, which had been approved by voters a decade before, Obama declared, "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue."?Two months later, another Oregon paper, Willamette Week, asked Obama, "Would you stop the DEA's raids on Oregon medical marijuana growers?" His reply: "I would, because I think our federal agents have better things to do, like catching criminals and preventing terrorism."?The Oregon medical marijuana growers who were raided by the DEA yesterday probably are wishing that guy had been elected president.

"I can guarantee you that if [the] Oregon Medical Marijuana [Program] would have came and did a search of us and our papers, they would have happily drove off and did nothing," the owner of the property the DEA raided told A.P. The DEA says it found 451 plants.?Oregon's law allows designated growers to raise up to six plants per patient for up to four people. The landlord said he had 20 tenants who were designated as growers, meaning they could have been growing a total of up to 480 plants and still been "in clear and unambiguous compliance" with state law, which according to a 2009 Justice Department memo would make this raid a poor use of the government's resources. But according to a 2011 memo that the department insists is "entirely consistent" with the earlier one, compliance with state law offers no protection from federal prosecution. Got that?

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"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill

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Study: Crime in surrounding area increased after closure of LA medical marijuana dispensaries

By Associated Press, Published: September 21

LOS ANGELES ? A new study released Tuesday showed that when hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries were closed last year in Los Angeles crime rates rose in surrounding neighborhoods, challenging claims made by law enforcement agencies that the storefronts are magnets for crime.

The report by the nonprofit RAND Corp. reviewed crime reports for the 10 days prior to and the 10 days after city officials shuttered the clinics last summer after a new ordinance went into effect. The analysis revealed that crime increased about 60 percent within three blocks of a closed dispensary compared to the same parameters for those that remained open.

?If medical marijuana dispensaries are causing crime, then there should be a drop in crime when they close,? said Mireille Jacobson, a RAND senior economist and the study?s lead author. ?Individual dispensaries may attract crime or create a neighborhood nuisance, but we found no evidence that medical marijuana dispensaries in general cause crime to rise.?

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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill

View the original article here

Terminal cancer patient holds yard sale to help pay medical bills, government shuts it down

Chris | InformationLiberation

A neighborhood snitch rats on their terminally ill cancer patient neighbor for holding an "illegal" yard sale in her backyard and a government goon takes the call and shuts the dying woman's yard sale down. Welcome to life in the land of the free.

(KATU News) - A woman fighting a terminal form of bone cancer is trying to raise money to help pay bills with a few weekend garage sales, but the city of Salem says she?s breaking the law and is shutting her down.

Jan Cline had no idea, but the city of Salem has a clear law that states a person can only have three yard sales a year.

Cline has been selling her stuff in the backyard for a few weekends and said she thought she?d be fine by keeping the sale out of everyone?s way. [...]

So she decided to sell what she owned. The sale was bringing in several hundred dollars each weekend until one neighbor complained and she got a visit from the city.

?He said, ?I?m sorry. Rules are rules.??

Read the full story here.

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rules? Assholes are assholes... period. The neighbor that snitched ought to be very proud. Find something better to do with your time. What the hell is wrong with some people? ...who wants to make SupportJanCline.com?!

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill

View the original article here

Medical and legal experts launch new call for an inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly

*** Amid new calls for an inquest into the death of WMD expert Dr Kelly, certain sections of the media are promoting suggestions that Iraqi agents could have been responsible, citing an official source at a UN agency with known links to US/UK intelligence agencies. However, an operation by Iraqi agents is extremely unlikely, and would not explain why it was made to look like suicide. If Iraqi agents were responsible, this also does not explain why the spurious suicide conclusion was reached by the Hutton inquiry, or why the UK authorities actively concealed evidence and staged a cover-up. ***

New call for Dr David Kelly inquest

A group of experts have renewed calls for a formal inquest into the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly.

They say the official cause of death - a haemorrhage - was "extremely unlikely" in the light of new evidence.

The claim comes in a letter from eight senior figures, including a coroner, published in the Times newspaper.

Dr Kelly's body was found in 2003 near his Oxfordshire home after he was exposed as the source of a BBC story on the grounds for going to war in Iraq.

Instead of a coroner's inquest, then Prime Minister Tony Blair asked Lord Hutton to conduct an investigation, which found Dr Kelly committed suicide.

Lord Hutton's inquiry found the 59-year-old died from blood loss after slashing his wrist with a blunt gardening knife.

The letter's signatories include a former coroner, Michael Powers, a former deputy coroner, Margaret Bloom, and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.

They say Lord Hutton's conclusion is unsafe. They argue that a severed ulnar artery, the wound found to Dr Kelly's wrist, was unlikely to be life-threatening unless an individual had a blood-clotting deficiency.

"Insufficient blood would have been lost to threaten life," they write.

"Absent a quantitative assessment of the blood lost and of the blood remaining in the great vessels, the conclusion that death occurred as a consequence of haemorrhage is unsafe."

SOURCE

BBC News, "New call for Dr David Kelly inquest", 13 August 2010.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10961016

"The Insider" mailing list article, 14 August 2010.

View the original article here