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I'm not sure how the Republican party came to be known as the party of "compassionate conservatism," unless it was simply because they used to at least pretend to care about the problems of the middle and low-income class people. In this 2007 video of Republican Mitt Romney's exchange with a wheelchair bound man suffering from a rare and deadly form of muscular dystrophy, Romney's compassionate conservatism takes an icy cold form, as he turns his back on the ill young man, Clayton Holton, and walks away without answering his question.

This exchange, and others like it, will no doubt keep cropping up to haunt Romney throughout his campaign. His complete inability to relate to, or show anything resembling empathy towards mainstream Americans is stunningly on display here. If his position on medical marijuana was due to something he believes is a greater good, as a contender for president of the United States, he should certainly be able to articulate that.However this is likely due to the fact that Romney has no real solutions for real people's problems.

Transcript:

Sick Man: "I suffer from an extremely rare type of muscular dystrophy and I have to take medication or I'll die. Right now I weigh less than 80 pounds, I have all my life. Um, I have support of 5 of my doctors that I am living proof that Medical Marijuana works. I am completely against legalizing it for everyone but there is medical . . ."

Romney: "And you have synthetic marijuana that's available and other . . . "

Sick Man: "It makes me sick. I've tried it and it makes me throw up. I have tried all the medications they are and all the forms they come in after my stimulators, the steroids. I have muscular dystrophy, that's completely against my DNA."

Romney: "I'm sorry to hear that."

Sick Man: "My question to you is, will you arrest me and my doctors if I get medical marijuana?"

Romney: "I'm not in favor of medical marijuana."

(Romney looks away, moves on to next person mid-conversation)

Sick Man: "So, will you have me arrested? . . . "

Romney: "Hi, how are you?" (moving on to next person in line)

Sick Man: "Excuse me, will you please answer my question?"

3rd Person: "You're not going to answer his question, Governor?"

Romney: "I think I have."

3rd Person: "No, he asked you if you were going to arrest him. He asked if you were going to arrest patients like him, Governor? You're just going to ignore a person in a wheelchair?"

Romney: "I spoke with him."

3rd Person: "Yeah, but you didn't answer his question!"

Granted, the Obama administration's stance on medical marijuana isn't any more appealing to medical marijuana advocates than Romney's, and came under fire from Democrat Nancy Pelosi earlier this month for the continued raids on marijuana dispensaries. The difference is that I doubt Obama would turn his back and walk away from someone with a legitimate concern about any issue, let alone a sick man in a wheel chair.

At least Romney didn't throw this man down on the ground and cut his hair off.

Clayton Holton, while still wheel-chair bound, and suffering the effects of the muscular dystrophy as it ravages his body, he is able to maintain some semblance of normalcy in his quality of life. He continues to credit marijuana for keeping him alive, and remains a staunch advocate of medical marijuana.

[Video Credit: Heather, H/T Ministry of Truth]

I don't like pot. I don't like the smell or the high, never did. But I had a come-to-Jesus moment lately when I had to take medication that made me horribly nauseated for ten straight days, and the Compazine my doctor prescribed to take the edge off wasn't much help. I found myself thinking that if marijuana would have made me feel normal again, I'd have been thrilled to have it. Why should anyone be denied a harmless medicinal herb that helps them? I'm still waiting for some rational explanation from the Obama administration as to why Eric Holder's Justice Department is going after marijuana providers - and users:

SAN FRANCISCO - April 27 - The San Francisco Democratic Party adopted a resolution yesterday demanding that President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag "cease all Federal actions in San Francisco immediately, respect State and local laws, and stop the closure of City-permitted medical cannabis facilities." The resolution was co-sponsored by 21 members of the party's Central Committee (DCCC) including: its author Gabriel Haaland, Assembly member Tom Ammiano, State Senator Leland Yee, Supervisor David Campos, Supervisor David Chiu, former State Senator Carole Migden, and former Supervisor Aaron Peskin.

The DCCC argues that, "the U. S. Attorneys in California are not targeting individuals and organizations that are operating outside of the law, but instead are aggressively persecuting a peaceful and regulated community, wasting Federal resources in using a series of threatening tactics to shut down regulated access to medical cannabis across the state of California." The DCCC also accuses the federal government of "depriving...the State of California much needed tax revenue."

This reminds me of the mostly toothless Rolling Stone interview with Obama conducted by Jann Wenner in the new issue. Wenner did manage to get in a question about pot, and Obama's evasions went unchallenged:

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.

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. I do think it's important and useful to have a broader debate about our drug laws. One of the things we've done over the past three years was to make a sensible change when it came to the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. We've had a discussion about how to focus on treatment, taking a public-health approach to drugs and lessening the overwhelming emphasis on criminal laws as a tool to deal with this issue. I think that's an appropriate debate that we should have.

Wenner's just so tickled to be interviewing Obama that his brains leaked out his shoes. Can't ask the Justice Department to "ignore completely a federal law that's on the books?" Puhleeze. Tell that to Wall Street! And there's not even a question that medical marijuana users are being prosecuted. How dumb is Wenner?

And elsewhere in the same article, Obama contends that in many cases, Wall Street was only "technically" wrong, not actually guilty of breaking laws.

I suppose this is why this administration is pushing hard for the state attorneys general deal that will indemnify banks and mortgage companies against criminal prosecution? Because they didn't do anything criminally wrong, only "technical" violations?

Wenner should have taken Taibbi with him. We might have gotten some real answers.

I can't think of many bigger wastes of time and money than going after people who are using and distributing medical cannabis. While I don't have a dog in this fight, I know my deceased ex-husband counted on marijuana to get him through his chemo, and I have a friend who has serious balance and nausea issues as a result of long-term head trauma who uses it to stay functional. Lots of people, whether they know it or not, probably know at least one person who uses/used pot to get through cancer treatment.

Is this really how we want to spend tax money? Seriously?

After more than six years of litigation, and three years of appeals for manufacturing and conspiracy to manufacture and distribute cannabis, Dr. Marion "Mollie" Fry and her husband of 25 years, civil attorney Dale Schafer, attended a hearing at the US courthouse in Sacramento Monday week, in which their bonds were revoked and they were given a the date of May 2 to surrender to serve five-year federal prison terms.

Fry and Schafer's prior home located in the hills just north of Sacramento was raided in 2001, with 34 plants confiscated - what they believed to be well below the 99 plant limit set forth by local ordinances.

According to Schafer, the couple had never grown more than 44 plants in a given year. A little known fact, he explained, is that under federal law more than 100 plants grown in a five year period, accumulatively, is cause for the mandatory five-year sentence, overriding state laws.

Dr. Fry, who had gone through a radical mastectomy just three years prior, had made the decision to grow her own medicine, medicating through her illness, surgery and continued to medicate from myriad complications from chemotherapy until the arrest. Schafer suffers from hemophilia and failed back syndrome, is under constant care, and had also medicated with cannabis legally.

According to Fry and Schafer, prior to the arrest they had conferred numerous times with local officials, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, and El Dorado County Sheriff's Detectives Timothy McNulty and Robert Ashworth, regarding the legality of their cannabis production for their own use and for Fry’s patients.

"We weren't selling the medical cannabis to my patients," Fry said. "We had staff and were charging $10 for delivery only, and that's a common practice today."

Ultimately it was staff, Schafer said, who broke rules, and ultimately they were responsible for all actions.

"We fired anyone who wasn't following the code of the law," Schafer said. "One week before we were raided, two undercover Federal Agents attended a workshop for 215 cardholders we were holding at the local Grange Hall. The chef teaching the class allowed patients to go home with some of the edibles made, including the agents."

Fry said comments were made during the class that may have been misunderstood by the agents, saying it was a comedy of errors with a not so amusing ending.

"The judge wouldn’t allow any medical evidence. They wouldn't let us tell the jury I was sick, or that I was a doctor," Fry said. "They wouldn’t allow that I was helping sick patients. Ironically, two years before the raid, local authorities asked me to tell them who of my patients were 'really' sick, and who wasn't." I told them it wasn't my job to police my patients, and that everyone who came to me had legitimate health issues. They have treated us like criminals."

Fry's lineage includes seven generations of doctors. Family notables include her grandfather, Dr. Francis Marion Pottenger, celebrated for being at the forefront of curing tuberculosis in the early 1900s, and founding the field of internal medicine in the process. Her grandmother studied under Carl Jung in the 1950s, founding a Jungian institute in Houston in the 1960s, while her mother also became a physician in the 1950s.

[...] Dr. Fry's license to practice has been revoked for some time now, as has her husband's license to practice law. The couple's grown children with grandkids have moved back home to help with finances and save the family home. A Pay Pal account has been set up for donations. It can be accessedhere

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[H/t CSPANJunkie]

It's funny how Republicans keep talking amongst themselves about how they can get back ahead of Democrats -- usually by reverting to tactics (like the "Contract On For America") that worked twenty years ago but have nothing to do with the shape of America going forward.

Instead, they clutch vigorously to their old standbys even as America changes before them. The classic case of this is the GOP's ongoing affair with immigration-bashing nativists, even as the country demographically before their eyes.

Similarly, they insist on clinging to outdated policies like the "War on Drugs" and the hardline stance that we should basically criminalize drug users and keep relatively harmless drugs like marijuana illegal, even for proven medical use.

But the times, they are a-changin':

A poll by Zogby International released today found that 41% of Americans agree that “the government should treat marijuana more or less the same way it treats alcohol: it should regulate it, control it, tax it and only make it illegal for children.” This represents a striking increase from previous nationwide polls on making marijuana legal.

The Obama administration, at least, is edging slowly in the direction of sanity,having announced last month that it would cease prosecuting people for possession in states that allow medical marijuana.

This policy has the Republicans all a-dither, as you can see in the video above of the hysterical grilling Sen. Tom Coburn gave Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this month about the issue.

Similarly, Republicans on the local level are working quietly to undermine this policy shift. In Washington state, as Lee Rosenberg recently reported for HorsesAss, the state's GOP attorney general, Rob McKenna, has been quietly attacking our medical-marijuana law on his own:

Here in Washington, our state law enforcement officials should be following the voter initiative passed in 1998 (and the follow-up legislation from 2007), not the Federal law. Unfortunately, our Attorney General doesn’t seem to agree. Rob McKenna’s office has been trying to undermine Washington State’s medical marijuana law, and thanks to a Public Disclosure Request, we’re finally able to shine some light on what they’ve been doing.

After the PDR was filed, nearly 800 pages of emails and other documents from the Department of Corrections were recently released to the Cannabis Defense Coalition. They’re broken up into eight 100-page PDF files. The documents are not in any order, so I created a chronological index for easy searching of specific events.

The reason that so much attention is focused on the DOC is because a number of qualified medical marijuana patients have been raided by police and arrested (the medical marijuana law does not provide an affirmative defense from arrest), pressured into accepting plea deals that would keep them out of a jail cell but still on probation, and then put under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. The Department of Corrections would then claim the authority to deny those individuals the ability to use medical marijuana through internal rules that they’d made up after consulting with the AG’s office. They would then easily enforce those rules by administering drug tests. In the end, you had individuals who’d been authorized by their doctors to use medical marijuana having law enforcement interfere with that decision and either force them to stop using that medicine or to use a less effective alternative like Marinol.

This end-around of the voter-approved medical marijuana law worked on a number of medical marijuana patients. Pamela Olson was one victim before her husband Bruce fought his own case in Kitsap County court and won (sadly, they lost their home in the process). It’s not clear, even with the released documents, exactly how many people were affected by this (names are redacted throughout), but lawyers who defend authorized patients have been dealing with cases across the state for several years now and are still hoping to bring some kind of legal action against the Attorney General, the DOC, or both.

Go read the whole piece, which is an excellent example of citizen journalism at its finest. (None of the local media, incidentally, have picked up on the story.)

It's truly maddening that the state's chief law-enforcement officer has been working so hard to undermine a law duly passed (and reinforced) by the citizens of the state. But then, it seems to be part of the Republican condition these days: clinging to outdated ideas because doing so just seems conservative, you betcha.

Incidentally, Rosenberg also posted this graphic recently underscoring just what a waste of our national resources our pig-headed pot laws really are:

I thought Republicans were for the small businessmen and against more government regulation? (Not to mention that most business experts recommend concentrating on "core competencies." Think growing marijuana is Rutgers' area of expertise?)

If the GOP ever acted consistently with their stated principles, I think I'd drop dead from the shock. But Gov. Christie has already proved he has no such scruples:

TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie’s administration said Rutgers University’s agricultural center should grow the pot and hospitals should dispense it under the state’s medical marijuana program, according to three people briefed on the proposal.

If legislators agree with the administration and amend a law that passed in January, New Jersey would be the first among the 14 medical marijuana states to run a centralized production and distribution system. The proposed changes represent an even more restrictive program — beyond one that was already the most conservative in the country — and eliminate the option of entrepreneurial growers and dispensaries getting some of the state’s marijuana business.

Letting the program operate through one grower and hospitals would minimize some of Christie’s concern about the program posing a security and safety threat, according to the sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the details.

Critics have said the governor is needlessly dragging his feet in a state that has at least 5,000 citizens who need the drug to alleviate pain and suffering.

Roseanne Scotti, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance of New Jersey, said she had heard "rumors" about the state wanting to involve Rutgers and hospitals. She said she wished the administration would stick to the bill that took years to pass.

"Why go back to drawing board, especially when seriously ill people are waiting?" she asked. Scotti also said the changes would limit economic growth from the medical marijuana industry.

"A lot of very responsible and respectable people have begun to step forward," she said. "I thought the Christie administration is supposedly business-friendly."

I don't smoke pot and don't like it, so I have no real dog in this fight. But I do have a close friend who suffers from severe vertigo after a head injury, and sometimes pot is the only drug that makes her functional - an important backup since she builds up resistance to the pharmaceuticals that do help.

I know how difficult it is for her to deal with an ordinary doctor's visit, let alone a trip to the hospital, and I don't think she's the only person like this out there.

So Gov. Christie, whatever your intent, the results are just plain mean.

Reefer Madness: The debate about Medical Marijuana is on!

Does marijuana help people like Angel Raich? Is it illegal if a doctor prescribes it? "The justices refused three years ago to protect distributors of medical marijuana from federal anti-drug charges." Or do people just want to get stoned?

There’s also the argument that says we need the FDA to study it more closely. What about the Vioxx scandal and a supposed coverup by the FDA that David Graham brought to the public? I think all you need to do is talk to someone from the seventies and you'll get all the information that you need to know. Why did it take a study from 2001 to tell us that pot gives you the munchies?

I'm surprised the big drug companies aren't pushing to allow them to distrbute yet another drug legally out into society. There are ads on 24/7 that makes it seem like happiness is a just a pill away!

Yet children are commiting suicide from these Antidepressants that are supposed to be a godsend.

Where’s the outrage?

When has anyone jumped off a bridge after smoking a joint? You might want to eat the bridge, but normally, one wants to lie on the couch with a bag of chips and a subway footlong sandwich and watch the tube.

The side effects for oxycodone, percocet, and vicodin often include addiction and painful withdrawals, yet are almost completely ignored as a deterrent in their prescription by doctors.

The other argument that doctors will write prescriptions blatantly like drug dealers is capricious at best. I don’t think a person will be able to walk into a doctor’s office and say, "I have this twinge, can you write a script for chronic?" They can already go to the mall and do that. If marijuana will help people, then what is all this hubbub? Do we still have Reefer Madness on our minds?

Talk Left has a series of great articles about MM.

Here's an in-depth video clip segment from Aaron Brown on the subject:

Video

I think it's awfully nice of them to promise not to arrest sick people who are trying not to puke their guts out:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday.

Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.

The new policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in March that he wanted federal law enforcement officials to pursue those who violate both federal and state law, but it has not been clear how that goal would be put into practice.

Mike's Blog Round up

We got Jack in da House and some bloggers all over this like white on rice.
The Recovering Liberal and the Petrelis Files follow the Abramoff money, Taylor Marsh has a primer on the Abramoff/Suncruz/Bob Ney imbroglio, and Steve just eviscertaes Jack and his pestilential brood.

The Heretik: The Answer

AGITPROP: You know it's coming...

Bring It On: Scott McClellan's mother quits the GOP, but a Hall of Fame football player is ready to take up the slack.

Hit and Run: just eviscertaes Jack and his pestilential brood.

The Heretik: The Answer

AGITPROP: You know it's coming...

Bring It On: Scott McClellan's mother quits the GOP, but a Hall of Fame football player is ready to take up the slack.

Hit and Run: One More Reason to Love Rhode Island (Medical Marijuana Edition)

One More Reason to Love Rhode Island (Medical Marijuana Edition)

Nice Supreme Court we Have: Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People

If there was money to make and Pfizer(Viagra=blindenss) and Merck (Vioxx=heart attacks) had developed a pill that contained THC which simualted the effects of marijuana that helped people ease their pain would anybody be up in arms? If the drug lobbyists then poured millions of dollars into politicians pockets to get the drug approved would anybody complain?

Bill O'Reilly goes on and on over the fact that some doctors illegally prescribe pot and therefore the suffering people should be left to writhe in pain. It's not marijuana's fault, it's the doctors fault so in Bill's mind all people must suffer. Idiot. How much prescription drug abuse is going on right now with Vicodin and Oxycontin, the drug of choice for Rush Limbaugh? What about teens and antidepressants? Where's O'Reilly's big undercover sting? Even Chief Justice William Rehnquist thought it should be a states issue. Regardless, if there was money to be made from medical marijuana it would be legal right now.

Arthur has more...