Cannabis use causes cell mutations altering DNA which can lead to cancer

Reported here.

Former Republican Massachusetts Governor William "Mr Magoo" Weld, now on the Cannabis ticket, smokes some bad weed

From hero . . .

. . . to zero. Paranoia will destroya.

I'd post on the total popular vote in Oregon, but 7% of it remains out on the Republican side two days since the primary

You probably didn't see it but voters prepare a ballot which is mailed to them ahead of time and then they drop it on election day in designated secure boxes all around the state.

How hard can that be to tally everything in a timely manner?

Maybe tomorrow, man.

Arrested in May 1970 with shoe boxes full of marijuana, Indiana establishment Republicans want their governor to be president, not Trump

Mitch Daniels

Now that fascist Trump has kids pledging to HIM never to take drugs or smoke cigs, and go easy on the alcohol

The horror.

Here.

Famous libertarian takes test, finds out he's a LEFTIST

Yet more evidence that conservatives should dump the libertarians, who belong in the Democrat Party, not the Republican.

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson took the test at isidewith.com, reported here by CNBC:

"The candidate that most paired up with my beliefs is (Vermont Sen.) Bernie Sanders at 73 percent," the 2012 Libertarian candidate told CNBC in a phone interview this week from New Mexico.

Funny he needed a test to figure out where he really stands. How un-self-aware can you be? Apparently liberalism is more of a mental disorder than we knew, and marijuana-induced hallucinations less revelatory than he knew.

Johnson received almost 1% of the popular vote for president in 2012 running as a libertarian, but continues to insist "that the vast majority of the people in this country are libertarian".

Uh huh. 

Bipolar diseased WaPo publishes sympathetic "hit piece" on Marco Rubio

In which you're meant to wonder how one family can produce a viable candidate for the presidency but also a cocaine dealer.

Here.

The heroine through it all is Marco's sister, and frankly it's none of our damn business.

What's the difference between a stupid liberal and smart liberal?

The smart liberal always uses a clean needle.

Commentary Magazine's Jonathan Tobin doesn't even read what he cites, making a hash of Obamacare story

Jonathan Tobin here:

"This is something of a misnomer because, as the Heritage Institute pointed out in a paper published last month, almost all of these people were simply added to the rolls of those receiving Medicare. If you only count those who are actually receiving insurance outside of Medicare, the net increase of those with coverage (the number of those buying these policies is offset by an almost equal reduction in the number of customers who have employer-based plans) is only 260,000 people."

Ah, no.

First of all the paper was from the "Heritage Foundation", not the "Heritage Institute". Perhaps he's heard of it? It's only been a Washington fixture since like the Reagan Administration. He does remember Reagan, right? Well, he is a neoconservative.

And it was the rolls of Medicaid which were expanded, not Medicare. What kind of a dummy gets that wrong? Medicare is for older Americans. Medicare is supposed to be paid for through payroll taxes, and it's blowing up as we speak, but that's another story. Medicaid used to be health coverage for the poor and the indigent, provided by the States. Leave it to Obama to expand it from DC and call it insurance.

The middle class of this country will end up poor and indigent and on Medicaid, too, if someone doesn't put a stop to this train wreck called Obamacare and soon.

Middle class people have just had their taxes raised dramatically to provide coverage and subsidies to pay for that coverage to about 9 million people who didn't have it before or didn't have what they're getting now. Middle class taxes went up in the form of health insurance premium increases, raised deductibles and skyrocketing pharmaceutical price increases. Middle class people buying the cheapest of plans now can expect to shell out over $13,000 in premiums and deductibles before their plans pay out one red cent of a big healthcare bill. The incentive for them is to avoid care even when they need it in order to save money.  

All Tobin had to do to get the article moving in the right direction was to actually read the title of the Heritage paper and the accompanying abstract, but apparently he didn't do even that. One wonders if he even wrote the story himself. He is Commentary's "editor" after all.

What a putz. 

Backgrounder #3062 on Health Care

October 15, 2015

2014 Health Insurance Enrollment: Increase Due Almost Entirely to Medicaid Expansion

By Edmund F. Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski

Abstract

Health insurance enrollment data for 2014 shows that the number of Americans with health insurance increased by 9.25 million during the year. However, the vast majority of the increase was the result of 8.99 million individuals being added to the Medicaid rolls. While enrollment in private individual-market plans increased by almost 4.79 million, most of that gain was offset by a reduction of 4.53 million in the number of people with employment-based group coverage. Thus, the net increase in private health insurance in 2014 was just 260,000 people.

Paul Krugman, comedian: The Danes aren't melancholy

Here:

'Nor are the Danes melancholy: Denmark ranks at or near the top on international comparisons of “life satisfaction.”'

Denmark also ranks at or near the top for antidepressant use. 

(chart source)

Surprise, The New York Times thinks Denmark, the land of the drunk, mean and discriminatory, is just wonderful!

Here, lying through its teeth, as usual:

'[Hillary] also said, “We are not Denmark.” Nope. Not by any stretch. Denmark has a slightly higher tax load on its citizens than the United States. But it also has budget surpluses, universal health care, shorter working hours, and was recently rated by Forbes magazine as the best country in the world for business.'

Hm, the same place as this:

"Yeah yeah, I’m being too harsh. Every country has problems, Denmark’s are just different from the ones I grew up used to. Overall, Denmark is quiet, introverted and socialist, my three favorite things. Also, if I ever want to spend a weekend being drunk, mean and discriminatory, at least now I know where to go."

The Danes lately excel at being in hock, in addition to being drunk, mean and discriminatory:

"Danish households owe their creditors 321 percent of disposable incomes, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s the highest ratio in the world and a level that’s prompted warnings from both the OECD and the International Monetary Fund to rein in borrowing. Danish authorities have argued that households aren’t at risk thanks to high pension and household equity levels."

Denmark has the top tax rate in the OECD in 2014, 60.4%, ahead of Sweden (56.9%), Portugal (56.5%), and France (54.5%). The rate for the US is listed at 46.3%.

Denmark's top tax rate is 30% higher than in the US. That's what The New York Times means by "slightly higher".

Denmark not coincidentally is a global frontrunner in depression and mental illness. It consumes 84 antidepressant doses per day per 1000 of population, second only to Iceland (101 doses).

Rush Limbaugh can't remember shit about taxes under Reagan: Why do we listen to this guy?

Here yesterday, wrong on both years, and forgetting that G. H. W. Bush raised taxes by adding a 31% bracket in 1991, getting himself defeated by Clinton in 1992:

"What did Ronald Reagan do? When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 the top marginal tax rate was 90%. And the amount of money raised by the tax code was about $500 billion back then. When Reagan left office in 1989, there were three tax rates, essentially two, but there was a 31% bubble in there. But the top 90%, that marginal rate of 90% had been dropped to 28%. And the amount of money generated by the tax code had doubled, almost a billion dollars, by reducing tax rates."

Revenues in 1981 were $599.3 billion nominal, in 1989 $991.1 billion, up 65%, not 100%. Revenues did not double until 1993-1994, after Bush and then Clinton raised marginal rates as high as 39.6%. Revenues did not double again until 2006. The record shows that whether marginal rates were higher or lower, revenues took twelve to thirteen years to double.

What Rush Limbaugh means by "doubled, almost a billion dollars" is anybody's guess. Only his pharmacist knows for sure.

The facts are that Ronald Reagan persuaded Democrats to bring the top marginal rate down from 70% in 1981 to 50% 1982-1986. After the tax reform of 1986 the top marginal rate dropped to 38.5% in 1987. For three years 1988 through 1990 there were just two marginal rates: 15% and 28%. That was the brief golden age of taxation under Reagan, which his successor totally screwed up.

Reagan had NOTHING to do with the introduction of a 31% bracket. That was all on George Herbert Walker Bush, for which the Democrats recently gave him the Profiles in Courage Award.

Chris Plante: Hunter Biden exposed in Ashley Madison hack

Reports Plante on the air just now:

The son of Joe Biden denies it, says Putin or somebody fabricated it, says he's dropped the email address. Hunter Biden has an unusual business interest in Ukraine.

Update:

ABC News helpfully reminded everyone in the story about the hack that Hunter had left the Navy in 2014 under a cloud for testing positive for cocaine in 2013.

Breitbart reported here that his Ashley Madison profile was set up on June 17, 2014, four months after his discharge.

CNN reported here last October (!) that Biden was discharged in February (!) 2014.

Glengariff poll in Michigan obviously skewed by opinions of Lansing elites, designed to get the results it wanted

The socially liberal results of the Glengariff poll reported here were skewed by polling "Lansing leaders" and "Michigan residents". What counts is voters, and a decent sample size of same.

From the story:

"The 600-person representative sample of state voters, Lansing leaders and Michigan residents found that participants have different views on gay rights."

The libertarian free-traders in both parties have killed the American middle class: Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, Obama

From Patrick J. Buchanan, here:

The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit. Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.

And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too. The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade. Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”

The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes. If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy. And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?

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I've checked Buchanan's math and he's exaggerating a bit. The total is precisely $9.5 trillion . . . if you go back as far as 1982 under Reagan, but you get the point.

Infected Texas Ebola nurse shouldn't have been allowed on a domestic flight, but it's OK for Liberians to travel to the USA

Thomas Frieden, MD, director of the CDC and red diaper doper baby graduate of Oberlin College and Columbia University, quoted here today:

The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that a second Dallas nurse who has been infected with Ebola shouldn’t have traveled halfway across the country on a commercial flight the day before she reported her possible illness. New measures are being put into place to ensure that other health-care workers at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas who had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the first victim of Ebola in the U.S., are restricted from travel as long as they are being monitored for symptoms of the disease, said CDC Director Tom Frieden. “She [Amber Joy Vinson] should not have been on that plane,” Dr. Frieden said to reporters of the health-care worker, who he said had a temperature of 99.5 the day she flew.

But here he was on October 3 arguing for an open border with West Africa:

“Even if we tried to close the border, it wouldn’t work,” the top health official added. “People have a right to return. People transiting through could come in. And it would backfire, because by isolating these countries, it’ll make it harder to help them, it will spread more there and we’d be more likely to be exposed here.”

Oh, but closing borders within the US will work? And people here don't have a right to return home, which is what Ms. Vinson was doing?

If Duncan had never come here, we wouldn't have all these problems in Texas and now Ohio today, and two Americans with infections with a disease which is a death sentence wouldn't have them.

Frieden and Obama should be in jail, where we can limit the infection they spread.

Outrageous race-baiter Robin Wright for CNN won't tell you Duncan got brincidofovir

People like Robin Wright belong in the dustbin of history along with Obama.

Here she is insinuating Duncan the Dallas Ebola victim didn't get treated like a white person would be:

Louise [Duncan's girlfriend] refused to allow her last name to be used for fear of repercussions. Unfortunately, doctors and the pharmaceutical developer said there was no longer any ZMapp left for Duncan or any other victim. But the imagery that accompanied his plight lingers: Whites can be flown to the United States or Europe at any expense, while Africans are left to die unattended on the streets of Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or now, without ZMapp, in Dallas.

But the Associated Press reports here that doctors did everything they could for Duncan, including giving him experimental drugs from North Carolina, with the FDA's blessing:

Just after midnight Oct. 4, Duncan went into multiple organ failure. By morning, a shipment of brincidofovir arrived and Duncan got the first dose.

Avowed liberal and Democrat, actor Robin Williams, supposedly commits suicide

Nikki Finke here:

The actor suffered a lifelong struggle with depression, alcohol and drugs. After starting his battle with addiction in the 1970s he once explained it this way: "Cocaine for me was a place to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down." ... [A]vowed liberal and Democrat, Williams was a frequent supporter of and contributor to progressive causes and campaigns.

------------------------------------------------------------

Some people would say self-destructive behavior ending in suicide is the logical conclusion of liberalism, and that Robin Williams simply finally realized that.

We'll see if it really was suicide.

I for one think the liberalism is an artifact in this case. It's more an example of the tragic hero whose incredible gift almost depended on a deeply profound curse from which it derived its sheer magnitude and excellence, a bipolar extremism which few can imagine or understand who haven't experienced it for themselves.

Libertarians are really about restricting people less, which makes them liberals not conservatives

From The New York Times, here:

[Nick] Gillespie [of Reason Magazine] was unimpressed by Ronald Reagan, who declared a new “war on drugs,” raised the national drinking age to 21, raised all sorts of taxes, preserved Social Security which Gillespie regards as federally mandated generational theft) and in general claimed to champion American individualism while squashing it every chance he got.

“I was never conservative,” he told me as we sipped our gin. “Republicans always saw libertarians as nice to have around in case they wanted to score some weed, and we always knew where there was a party. And for a while it made sense to bunk up with them. But after a while, it would be like, ‘So if we agree on limited government, how about opening the borders?’ No, that’s crazy. ‘How about legalizing drugs? How about giving gays equal rights?’ No, come on, be serious. And so I thought, There’s nothing in this for me.”

". . . Part of why I’m a libertarian is that if you restrict people less, interesting stuff happens.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Conservatives restrict themselves. If libertarians restrict anything, it just shows their incoherence.

Damn those speed limit and stop signs, and those cops, which keep me and my kid safe on the way to school, except less so now thanks to libertarianism in places like Colorado, where the interesting stuff which is happening is more traffic accident deaths due to marijuana legalization.

Libertarians. Malcontents. Sectarians. 

One reason why Americans have lost their passion and don't seem to care about very much

One reason why Americans have lost their passion and don't seem to care about very much is that they are taking large quantities of psychotropic drugs, many of which level their moods so that they are not too happy and not too sad.

In 2011 the top 25 psychiatric medication prescriptions numbered a staggering 391 million. Most of these prescriptions are for drugs such as SSRIs, SARIs, SNRIs or NDRIs for depression, anxiety and other mental disorders, with just 33 million of the prescriptions intended solely for attention deficit disorder.

Data here.