July 2010 archive

VA doctors still can’t prescribe marijuana but the patients in the 14 states where it is legal, no longer have to fear losing their VA benefits if the are found using marijuana. Certainly a step in the right direction for many patients.

DENVER – The Department of Veterans Affairs will formally allow patients treated at its hospitals and clinics to use medical marijuana in states where it is legal, a policy clarification that veterans have sought for several years.

A department directive, expected to take effect next week, resolves the conflict in veterans facilities between federal law, which outlaws marijuana, and the 14 states that allow medicinal use of the drug, effectively deferring to the states.

snip

Veterans, some of whom have been at the forefront of the medical marijuana movement, praised the new policy. They say cannabis helps sooth physical and psychological pain and can alleviate the side effects of some treatments.

“By creating a directive on medical marijuana, the V.A. ensures that throughout its vast hospital network, it will be well understood that legal medical marijuana use will not be the basis for the denial of services,” Mr. Krawitz said.

Many clinicians already prescribe pain medication to veterans who use medical marijuana for pain management, as there was no rule explicitly prohibiting them from doing so, despite the federal marijuana laws.

snip

Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, which favors the legal regulation of the drug, called the decision historic. “We now have a branch of the federal government accepting marijuana as a legal medicine,” he said.

But Mr. Fox said he wished the policy had been extended to veterans who lived in states where medical marijuana was not legal.

Mr. Fox said it was critical that the veterans department make clear its guidelines on medical marijuana to patients and medical staff members, something officials said they planned on doing in coming weeks.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Evacuation underway as storm heads to Gulf spill site

by Alex Ogle, AFP

52 mins ago

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Eugene Robinson: Obama needs to stand up to ‘reverse racism’ ploy

After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there’s no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.

A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation’s first African American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down.

snip

The Sherrod case has fully exposed the right-wing campaign to use racial fear to destroy Obama’s presidency, and I hope the effect is to finally stiffen some spines in the administration. The way to deal with bullies is to confront them, not run away. Yet Sherrod was fired before even being allowed to tell her side of the story. She said the official who carried out the execution explained that she had to resign immediately because the story was going to be on Glenn Beck’s show that evening. Ironically, Beck was the only Fox host who, upon hearing the rest of Sherrod’s speech, promptly called for her to be reinstated. On Wednesday, Vilsack offered to rehire her.

Shirley Sherrod stuck to her principles and stood her ground. I hope the White House learns a lesson.

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

I hope you got a chance to see yesterday’s exciting finish.  Contador and Schleck dueling up Col du Tourmalet in the fog as if the other riders didn’t exist.

Because it’s over.

Today is a sprint which means no change.  Tomorrow is the time trial where Contador is expected to dominate.  Sunday is the final stage ending with the Champs Elysees sprint.

I wouldn’t say I’m disappointed because that would be ignoring some realities.  Lance is done, if he ever comes back it will be as a commentator (and frankly he’s been dead on in his predictive abilities) or as a Team Manager (Radio Shack is largely his creation anyway).  The problem is that Le Tour is designed to feature the riders and not the teams so it’s not like staying loyal to Ferrari when Schumacher retired.

Without Armstrong Le Tour is much more difficult to get emotionally involved in.  I’ve tried rooting for Schleck but he doesn’t seem to have a killer instinct.  His difficulties aren’t just bad luck and equipment failure, his team is incomplete and his coaches and managers were never able to muster a convincing attack.  The ‘there’s always tomorrow’ attitude of sunny optimism may be good sportsmanship, but it sure lacked winning urgency.

Perhaps Contador has a personality I’ve yet to discover that will excite me in the future, but this Tour struck me as mechanical and emotionless.  I have no problem with his standards of ‘sportsmanship’, they provided the few interesting moments in a ride that was mind numbingly predictable and entirely lacked panache.

But maybe you are a fan who thinks that one perfect moment on the Col with the two top competitors locked in a head to head contest of strength and will, a yellow haze isolating them and turning both their maillot jaune, is worth 21 days of devotion.

Well, they bike through some beautiful countryside too.

• Cycling: Contador takes giant leap towards third Tour win
• Schleck wins Tour battle; war may be Contador’s
• Contador gifts stage win, looks poised for Tour
• Contador closes in on 3rd Tour title in 4 years

Schleck– I’m sure I’ll do a good time trial. I can see the yellow jersey in front of me, and I really want it, and I’m not going to give up until Paris.

Today’s stage is 123 miles from Salies-de-Béarn to Bordeaux (where they won’t produce plonk anymore).  Flat, 2 Sprints and the finish.

• Le Tour
• Wiki

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

THE GREAT COMET OF 1997. Above, the bright head of comet Hale-Bopp, called the coma, is pointed towards the Sun. The coma is composed of dust and gas, masking the solid nucleus of the comet made up of rock, dust and ice. Photo taken by Jim Young at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories Table Mountain Observatory in March 1997.

The comet was discovered in 1995 by two independent observers, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, both in the United States. Hale had spent many hundreds of hours searching for comets without success, and was tracking known comets from his driveway in New Mexico when he chanced upon Hale-Bopp just after midnight. The comet had an apparent magnitude of 10.5 and lay near the globular cluster M70 in the constellation of Sagittarius. Hale first established that there was no other deep-sky object  near M70, and then consulted a directory of known comets, finding that none were known to be in this area of the sky. Once he had established that the object was moving relative to the background stars, he emailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, the clearing house for astronomical discoveries.

Bopp did not own a telescope. He was out with friends near Stanfield, Arizona observing star clusters and galaxies when he chanced across the comet while at the eyepiece of his friend’s telescope. He realized he might have spotted something new when, like Hale, he checked his star maps to determine if any other deep-sky objects were known to be near M70, and found that there were none. He alerted the Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams through a Western Union telegram. Brian Marsden, who has run the bureau since 1968, laughed, “Nobody sends telegrams anymore. I mean, by the time that telegram got here, Alan Hale had already e-mailed us three times with updated coordinates.”

The following morning, it was confirmed that this was a new comet, and it was named Comet Hale-Bopp, with the designation C/1995 O1. The discovery was announced in International Astronomical Union circular 6187.

No Keith.  No Jon.  No Stephen.

You can watch the end of Le Tour again OR you have these other choices some of which don’t suck so much-

• AMC– Blood Work
• ESPN– US v. Canada (Women’s World Cup Softball)
• History– Helicopters, Parallel Universes, The Sahara
• TBS– Guess Who (ugh, Ashton Kutcher)
• Turner Classic– The Courtship of Andy Hardy, Tammy and the Bachelor
• TNT– 300 (Do you like Gladiator movies?)
• Food– Tenderloin 1 & 2
• FX– The Simpsons Movie

But my pick is Comedy Central’s Futurama marathon that includes most of the new episodes and the Lethal Inspection premier.

Later-

• AMC– Heartbreak Ridge

Dave has Joan Rivers, Bill Burr, and Steve Winwood.

Alton does Scrap Iron Chef, Home Insecurity.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Storm forces Gulf oil spill ships back to port

by Alex Ogle, AFP

1 hr 31 mins ago

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

David Sirota on Tax Cuts and Stupid Wars

In a terrific column for Tax.com, Pulitzer-Prize winner David Cay Johnston breaks down new government data and puts USA Today’s whole “lowest tax bills since 1950” revelation into dollars and cents we can all understand:

 

 In 1979 federal taxes for the median-income household totaled $6,100, but in 2007 taxes slipped to $6,000. That $100 decline, measured in 2007 dollars, understates what a bargain taxes have become. Back in 1979 federal taxes equaled 18.7 percent of comprehensive household income. By 2007 incomes had grown 28 percent in real terms, so the tax burden not only dropped in absolute dollars, it also fell as a share of median comprehensive income to 14.4 percent. So over 28 years median income has risen in real terms by $9,100 while federal taxes have fallen by $100.

As Johnston points out, this is not something you hear very much about from journalists — or as he puts it, “those who play journalists on television talk shows.” And you certainly don’t hear it from congressional Republicans or rank-and-file conservatives, who continue to bewail allegedly high taxes as our biggest problem, despite the real emergency of cash-strapped communities now slashing police forces, tear up roads and even outsource entire municipal workforces.

Robert Reich says We’re in a One-and-a-Half Dip Recession

We’re not in a double-dip recession yet. We’re in a one and a half dip recession.

Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average work week is down. The only things not down are inventories — unsold stuff is piling up in warehouses and inventories of unsold homes are rising — and defaults on loans.

The 1.5 dip recession should be causing alarm bells to ring all over official Washington. It should cause deficit hawks to stop squawking about future debt, blue-dog Democrats to stop acting like Republicans, and mainstream Democrats to get some backbone.

So last week I was asked ‘what is a normal question?’

I do upgrades and repairs primarily on XP Systems.  Why XP?  Installed base.  There’s hardly any software out there that won’t run under XP Pro x86 SP 3 except for stuff deliberately designed for other operating systems.

What other operating systems?  Well you may think I’m talking about Mac/Linux issues, but Microsoft offers other operating systems.  You’ve heard about Vista and 7 and there are infinite flavors of them to confuse you, but there are also ‘Business’ oriented variants starting with NT and “progressing” to “improvements” like XP-64 and Server 2008.

The primary characteristic of all these pieces of crap is that your old programs don’t work any more and your user interface changes and you have to learn a new one.

Are you doing something different with your computer than you were a year ago, or would you just like it to be faster?

Unfortunately Microsoft stopped supporting XP about a year ago and it is kind of vulnerable to crankiness like resource hog ‘anti-virus’ programs that behave more like viruses themselves.

Some of these things can be fixed, especially if you can boot from a utility drive (and everyone should know how to build one), others not so much.  The utility environment can do pretty much anything you need to do on the computer, you customize it at your own peril because it’s intended to be reloaded on a blank drive any time you don’t trust the 2 or 3 you have on hand for just such emergencies.

And that may sound like throwing hardware at the problem, but a 16 Gb Thumbdrive can be yours for a mere $30 if you don’t have stacks of old hard drives like I do in which case you will want one of these $25 parts.  The point is to get a utility drive you can boot from to take control of the computer and USB is a good and portable way to handle most modern desktops and laptops.

Next week- Installing XP Pro x86 SP 3, Part 1

So….. I’m coming home today, and I get on a bus downtown heading my way. In Vancouver a large percentage of the population is Asian.

I get on the bus, and besides me and the driver virtually everyone of the 30 or so people on the bus are Asian.

In the first double seat behind the driver, under the little window sticker that says these are priority seats for elderly and handicapped persons there is a little tiny sparrow of a Chinese lady probably about 85 years old or so sitting in the aisle seat with her grocery bags, so I sit down across the aisle from her.

The bus continues on and at the next stop a fat ugly lard assed white woman about 50 or so gets on the bus who looks, with the miserable scowl on her face, for all the world like a female version of Archie Bunker but not anywhere near as good looking.

She waddles over to the little Chinese lady across from me and motions for her to move over. There is silence on the bus. Chinese lady looks at her and turns sideways in the seat to let Archie in to the window seat.

Archie starts shouting “I’m not sitting in there – shove over or move! Move!“