Rafe Colburn comments on the slime machine:

Colburn is despondent today, thinking that the Swift Boat Veterans will torpedo Kerry’s chances to win the presidency all on their own.

But Josh Marshall thinks Kerry is getting fighting mad, discussing a new Kerry campaign ad which uses 2000 footage of John McCain castigating candidate Bush’s attempt to besmirch his war record, finishing with a shot of Bush’s speechless trapped face that cannot fail to convince us what a shameless coward he was, and is. It strikes me that this is as much Kerry’s response to McCain’s re-embrace of the President, about which I wrote below, as to Bush’s smear attack.

And Ed Fitzgerald holds a hand out for people trying to find a way to kick the self-deceived-Republican-vote habit:

Fitzgerald is building on this wonderful plain speakin’ from Matt Yglesias:

Reduced to its essence, Yglesias is trying to hammer home a single concept, on which I repeatedly harp here — that, as he puts it, “intelligence matters more than character.” FmH readers will know that I have been pretty despondent about the voters’ receptivity to this notion.

But, hey, Bush and his slimy ilk just sink further and further into their sleazy morass, as made clear by this pair of columns from Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman on their latest Florida dirty trick. Maybe even the voters who still believe they need to vote for righteousness regardless of brains will have their eyes opened if this sort of thing continues.

PS: Do voters who like South Park have a sense of humor?

“A top government scientist who concluded last year that most antidepressants are too dangerous for children because of a suicide risk wrote in a memo this week that a new study confirms his findings.” (New York TimesThe ) The senior FDA epidemiologist drew his conclusion from a study of 22 studies, but his findings were reportedly suppressed by his bosses at the FDA. A newer study using different data analyzed by a different methodology parallels his conclusions. Should antidepressant prescribing to children be banned? Certainly, the credible evidence that they are more likely to commit suicide when administered antidepressants is worrisome. Children have less ability than adults to understand and contain the bodily agitation, the feeling “like you’re crawling out of your skin” (in the words of numerous patients), that some antidepressants can cause, so they are far more likely to get into trouble with these medications. And I feel that, like most psychotropics, they are far overprescribed by the pharmacological evangelists most of my profession have become, uncritically. However, I would be concerned if the rare truly, desperately, lethally depressed child were deprived of the possibility of a properly used powerful therapeutic agent. In other branches of medicine, doctors use very dangerous medications when the potential benefit outweighs the risk, and they are capable of using them carefully. Police the profession, not its armamentarium! And get the damn pharmaceutical industry and its single-minded devotion to its profit, which mediates for prescribing to more and more patients more and more uncritically, out of the central role it has in healthcare!

Actually, the FDA does not have the power to ban thei drugs’ use. As the equivalent agency in the UK has done, they can recommend restrictions in a medication’s use, but any licensed physician is able to prescribe a legal drug for any indication, including so-called ‘off-label’ uses, they deem necessary. Making antidepressant use off-label for children would have several consequences. First, one would hope doctors would become far more cautious, since an adverse outcome arising from an off-label use presents far more liability to the physician. Second, risk management in off-label prescribing requires far more stringent informed consent to the patient (or the patient’s parents or guardians). A thorough explanation of regulatory concerns about these drugs’ use would make many a parent too skittish to consent. Finally, prescription coverage by third-party payors for off-label uses may be denied or may require prior approval, effectively placing the drugs out of financial reach of many patients.

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An effective Democratic response to this would be to paint McCain’s newfound compliance as the selfserving attempt that it is to reestablish his party loyalty iin order to position himself for a 2008 presidential run.

One of my readers alluded to this study in a comment on another post on medical ethics, but it certainly deserves to be put out front. The medical profession has always considered such breaches as failures of individual ethical responsibility, and taken individual disciplinary action. This is consistent with the official whitewash of the Abu Ghraib scandal, where I predict (and have predicted) that official ‘soulsearching’ will ignore systemic permissiveness and facilitation of abuse in the military command structure and Pentagon/administration culture, blaming only the ‘morally depraved’ perpetrators. The evidence of medical and psychiatric participation in the abuses calls for an examination of broader issues of the corruption of inherent medical standards when used to support an immoral war machine.

Juan Cole wonders. His thinking is that Muslim Americans are an important voting bloc in the Midwest, including several important swing states. Adding to Muslim (and Christian Arab?) voters’ dismay at the defilement of the holy city are the domestic trampling on civil rights of Arab Americans, the poor economy and the ripple effect of rising oil prices because of the continuing Iraqi unrest. Much of the Arab American support Bush got on 2000, Cole says, was based on fears that a Gore-Lieberman administration would be heavily pro-Israel.

“He can find another way to advertise himself.” (Sports Illustrated) Another team member (whose cousin and several friends were killed by US military action in Fallujah) said that, if he were not playing soccer, he would “for sure” be fighting with the resistance to the US occupation.

This LA Times report says the embarrassed CIA Iraq Survey Group charged with finding WMD in Iraq will release a final report next month that shifts gears into speculating on what Iraq’s arsenal might have looked like by 2008 if the US had not invaded. The report is being assailed as a departure from the mandate of the group, as designed to obscure the fact that WMD were never found, as confusing the distinction between evidence and fanciful speculation, and as clearly politically motivated. It seems to me that David Kay (former director of the survey group)’s main problem was in resigning too soon. Of course, the dysadministration would try to repair the damage by putting in place a successor without his integrity who would be willing to have the group’s agenda hijacked in this manner. With the deceptions about WMD at the core of the growing outrage about the war and the change in dysadministration justification of the invasion from asserting Iraq had WMD to asserting it had intentions of and capability for weapons production, shouldn’t opponents have had their sights on what the Iraq Survey Group was doing for, oh, the past year or so? It was only last month that Congressional leaders were taken aback to learn of this plan in briefings from a representative of the weapons survey team who acknowledged (before moving on to another assignment and refusing to comment further) that its mandate indeed was “the search for and elimination of weapons of mass destruction.” While an outraged Representative’s request for assurances from John McLaughlin, interim director of the CIA, that the group’s report confine itself to what the search efforts in Iraq had actually yielded has gone unanswered, a CIA spokesperson dismissed charges that the shift in the group’s focus is politically motivated as [perhaps the most common phrase on the lips of government officials these days? &m-dash; FmH] “nonsense.”

Ostracizing the people who were right on Iraq.: