11-10-2004, 10:43 AM
|
#10 (permalink)
|
|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Sen
Since when is a public mandate a problem? I thought that was the whole point of representative democracy. As far as I'm concerned, he should be able to use his mandate to accomplish an actual agenda instead of always being bogged down in partisan politics. There shouldn't be anything wrong with that since the majority of Americans elected the Senators and Reps he will have to work with. At the end of the day, however, I don't think either chamber will allow the President to push an agenda that would endanger the viability of the Party in the immediate future.
|
Whatever Bushco does in the next two years, they'll own it. Should be
something to see....if we survive what happens next!
Quote:
<a href="http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/10115579.htm?1c">http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/10115579.htm?1c</a>
"I'm sure millions of Americans voted for George W. under the honest impression that he stands for moral values -- family, patriotism, faith in God. I'm sure it's the Democrats' fault that such a silly ruse is allowed to stand.
What Bush does stand for is nicely summed up by a rather common news story that got stuck on the business pages lately.
In September, Merck & Co., the huge drug manufacturer, pulled Vioxx off the market. Vioxx was a popular painkilling, anti-arthritis drug, but Merck said it was putting patients' safety first. A new study from the Federal Drug Administration showed that high doses of Vioxx triple the risk of heart attack and sudden cardiac death.
From there, the story bifurcates. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa revealed that the FDA had tried to silence the author of the study: Dr. David Graham, associate director of science in the Office of Drug Safety. Grassley said the FDA first sat on Graham's study and that then he was "ostracized" and "subjected to veiled threats and intimidation."
The Wall Street Journal followed the other fork, finding internal memos from Merck showing that company officials may have been aware of the dangers of Vioxx as long ago as 1996, including a memo apparently instructing its sales reps to "dodge" the question when doctors asked about the cardiac record of Vioxx.
We have a toothless regulatory agency in the pocket of the industry that it is supposed to patrol. We have an administration-wide contempt for science and plain facts.
The allegation against the folks at Merck is that they were making such enormous profits on a drug that killed people that when they knew or suspected that it was killing people, they kept right on selling it. When the information that Merck had known for a long time about Vioxx and heart attacks became public, the company's stock fell by 9.6 percent.
That's the system that Bush stands for -- one in which a corporation can knowingly kill people for profit, and when it finally comes out, everyone knows the penalties will be so light that the company doesn't even lose a tenth of its worth. Hey, just a little bump in the road.
We don't want any of that terrible, burdensome government regulation to control that kind of behavior, do we? We don't want an FDA that listens to its own scientists and acts promptly, do we? We don't want anyone to sue these monster corporations, do we?
If it were possible to compare the odds of an American getting killed by a negligent regulatory agency and rapacious corporate behavior vs. an American getting killed by a terrorist, it would turn out that we need to be a lot more scared of rank greed and its enablers than we do of terrorists. That's not counting what the corps -- that's short for corporations; say it like corpse -- steal and mess up."
|
|
|
|