Some people debate the merits of Muslim genocide, too

Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post today:

It’s past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of “alternative” questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is “the program.” Of course, he won’t fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons — and who knows where else? — but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous “waterboarding,” which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.

It is not possible for our elected representatives to hold any sort of honorable “debate” over torture. Bush says he is waging a “struggle for civilization,” but civilized nations do not debate slavery or genocide, and they don’t debate torture, either. This spectacle insults and dishonors every American.

Exactly.

Hat-tip to Creature.

Make it stop hurting

Updated below with show-time and location. 

Debra J. Saunders writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

YVONNE Westbrook of Oakland uses medical marijuana to control the spasms of multiple sclerosis. Valium left her with a heavy, drugged feeling. “A few tokes and the spasticity calms right down,” she noted in the documentary “Waiting to Inhale,” which will be shown at the Oakland International Film Festival on Thursday.

“Waiting to Inhale” will be shown on Thursday at the Oakland International Film Festival. Good to know, because the filmmaker doesn’t have this event listed on his website yet, but perhaps it will be updated soon.

Berkeley’s Jed Riffe, who made the documentary, also taped a debate in Washington, D.C., last week on medical marijuana. David Murray from the White House drug czar’s office spoke against legalization of marijuana, while two drug-war opponents, Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, and Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, spoke in its favor.

Murray was not exactly in an enviable position. A former colleague had canceled last minute. So there he was, taking an unpopular position alone, debating two opponents and a moderator sympathetic to legalization, columnist Clarence Page, as well as an audience filled with people who — I’m guessing here — either just want to smoke pot to get high or (worse for Murray) have a sick loved one such as Westbrook or Rosenfeld.

It gives me great hope and courage to see that the White House “drug czar’s” office will no longer run away from debates that they cannot win. We are not arguing about dangerous chemicals here, this is not a debate about the drug war. This is about cannabis. Some people get these confused and I want to make it clear that cannabis is safer than most pharmaceutical drugs.

Murray argued that doctors are not “the principal proponent” of pushing “smoked marijuana as medicine.” True, the American Medical Association isn’t pushing for medical marijuana. But the California Medical Association has supported medical marijuana. More important, doctors across the country have recommended marijuana to patients — at the risk of their own careers.

Indeed, it was doctors who sued first the Clinton administration, then the Bush administration, to fight federal efforts to keep them from recommending marijuana, as permitted by Proposition 215, the medical marijuana measure passed by California voters in 1996. The doctors won. And here’s something I learned from Nadelmann: the federal government had to pay more than $700,000 to reimburse groups such as his for the legal fees they incurred fighting the bad policy.

In other words, the big national association, which is highly political and dominated by the pharmaceutical industry, doesn’t support medical marijuana because it would be very unprofitable to have a natural alternative to patented and synthetic drugs which their income depends upon selling in large quantities and at high prices.

But look, when you go to a doctor, you don’t go to the AMA. You go see a human being who is skilled in the art of medicine, who knows what it is to have a condition like whatever you might have, and wants to help you to treat it with the least harmful approach that will be most effective. Some doctors have differences of opinion as to what is best and most effective, no doubt. But it is in the purview of the individual doctor with the individual patient to make recommendations about what is best for that patient.

Doctors are regulated inasmuch as they write prescriptions and perform procedures, but not in making recommendations. The latter is not only a matter of doctor-patient confidentiality, but is furthermore an exercise of free speech. You can disagree but you cannot prohibit a doctor from telling a female patient about her birth control options. You cannot require a doctor not to inform a patient who is suffering from a condition that cannabis treats that it would be helpful if it were possible to have.

Anyhow, read the whole article and go see the film if you can. I have to go see a doctor about something myself today, so the blogging will be light for a few hours today.

Update: More coverage and discussion at Cannabis News. Transcript of the medical marijuana debate is available at the DPA.

Update 2: Waiting to Inhale will be shown from 9:00pm-10:45pm on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at the Malonga Theater, 1428 Alice Street in Oakland, California.

Keith Olbermann, patriot

Keith Olbermann hits another one out of the park.

The President revealed this last Friday, as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once been an ambassador from the military to its critics.

The former Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

This President’s response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one’s breath, but within it contained one particularly chilling phrase.

“Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” he was asked by a reporter. “If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don’t you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you’re following a flawed strategy?”

“If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic,” Bush said. “It’s just — I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.

Of course it’s acceptable to think that there’s “any kind of comparison.”

And in this particular debate, it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary, even if Mr. Powell never made the comparison in his letter.

Some will think that our actions at Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo, or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, are all too comparable to the actions of the extremists.

Some will think that there is no similarity, or, if there is one, it is to the slightest and most unavoidable of degrees.

What all of us will agree on, is that we have the right — we have the duty — to think about the comparison.

And, most importantly, that the other guy, whose opinion about this we cannot fathom, has exactly the same right as we do: to think — and say — what his mind and his heart and his conscience tell him, is right.

All of us agree about that.

Except, it seems, this President.

With increasing rage, he and his administration have begun to tell us, we are not permitted to disagree with them, that we cannot be right, that Colin Powell cannot be right.

And then there was that one, most awful phrase.

In four simple words last Friday, the President brought into sharp focus what has been only vaguely clear these past five-and-a-half years – the way the terrain at night is perceptible only during an angry flash of lightning, and then, a second later, all again is dark.

“It’s unacceptable to think,” he said.

It is never unacceptable to think.

And when a President says thinking is unacceptable, even on one topic, even in the heat of the moment, even in the turning of a phrase extracted from its context, he takes us toward a new and fearful path — one heretofore the realm of science fiction authors and apocalyptic visionaries.

That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think.

Thus the lightning flash reveals not merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a monopoly on current truth.

You can watch the video at Crooks & Liars.

Hat-tip also to Gen. JC Christian and Jane Hamsher, both of whom already wrote about this extraordinary and much needed honesty from at least one mainstream news source. It’s only a shame that I don’t get MSNBC, although it is supposed to be on our cable service. We receive Free Speech TV on that designated channel instead, which is a fine thing to have. I just wish they’d blown off Fox News to make room for it instead.