SB4609:

"maybe we'll start to see drug dealers as legitimate vendors diligently responding to market demand"

Well, that's how I always viewed the guy who owned the grocery store down the way from where I lived in California, who had no problem selling me a bottle of 50% ethyl alcohol whenever I felt like buying a bottle (rarely, fwiw.). As long as the store was open, that is...he usually opened at 9am, closed at 8pm, off on Sunday. I put money in his hand, he handed me a bottle, we exchanged a few pleasantries, and went our separate ways.

Virginia is different...when an alcoholic beverage is distilled, the Commonwealth itself gets into the act. They have a monopoly on the legal retail outlets (rarely challenged by bootleggers, fwiw.) Same basic routine, though.

thingwesaid:

"prostitution is not a victimless crime and society, as a whole, has made it illegal for that reason"

What's this "society, as a whole"?

That can't even be said about "the whole" of the nation of the United States of America. The state of Nevada has legalized prostitution. I've visited Nevada. It's hardly a snakepit of degenerates. In fact, Nevadans aren't all that different from their neighbors in Utah, Arizona, or California (a place where the bars close at 2am, and no alcohol is allowed to be served in strip clubs featuring total nudity- a fact that caused continual consternation in some of my cab customers visiting from Bible Belt states like Georgia, where they averred that "strip clubs are real strip clubs.")

I don't want to romanticize prostitution. I think it's an overdone film topic. But driving people into corners and poking at them with sticks does not help them- and that's what the criminalization of adult consensual behaviors deemed "socially deviant" by the majority typically equates to, when matters play out in the real world, as opposed to playing out in the self-righteous imaginations of the persecutors.

And to hear people support both laws against prostitution and Drug Prohibition because people over their heads with drug dependencies, particularly young females, often become prostitutes because because their best/most reliable/only source of supply is illegal drug dealers who are simultaneously pimps...don't you get it? It's the illegality that enables and empowers the predatory criminal class.

I mean, open up your ears. Look around you. Much of the social discourse of young America currently revolves around corruption, cynicism, pandering, selling out, conspicuous consumption, partying like a drug kingpin, playing and beating the system if you're rich enough, or violent enough, or a peerless liar...the term "pimp" has been neologized to be a good thing.

There's your Pure and Holy Drug War, ye sado-moralists. There's your 40 years of "results."

[click on my signature for link]

A former chair of orthopedics says that he fell out with Brier because he wanted to give priority in the waiting rooms to patients who paid out of pocket or who had full insurance: "People who pay for health care don't want to sit in a room with fifty people. They want to be seen in a timely manner. I think that's very reasonable."

Speaking as a person with medical insurance: traditional standards of triage will be fine, thank you.

I have my own experience to relate, on the topic of "multiculturalism" in hospitals- but this one has to do with hospital staff, not patients. Before he passed away a couple of years ago, my late father was an emergency patient at Fairfax Inova hospital. Nearly everyone involved with his patient care there was either "nonwhite" and/or a first gen. immigrant- the doctors, nurses, medical techs, patient aides, cleaning staff. Both the care my father received and the helpfulness of the staff toward my family was excellent. With one exception- there was a nurse who was very brusque and impatient with up. She was a home-grown American, and her surname was Ger-well, lets just say she probably partook of my own partial ethnic heritage. (Such matters of identity are typically both elusive and defiant of rational explanation, no?)

But maybe she was just having a bad day...

I realize that in the article, the way that the "multiculturalism" business plays out regarding the patients at Maimonides is entirely different, with aspects that act as obstacles and tend to lead to predicaments. But my experience- and others, in other environments- bears out the notion that most the problems mentioned in the article associated with "multiculturalism" have more to do with factors such as indigence, lack of language and communication skills, and the well-known tendencies of elderly people to be increasingly set in their ways, than with multicultural interaction per se.

One more thing: notwithstanding my sympathetic stance toward many libertarian ideas, including economic proposals- this country needs single payer health care, at a reasonably comprehensive standard. It's practical good sense. The "health insurance companies" are cross-invested all over the place. They'll cope.

From the Rawstory interview with Larisa Alexandrovna,

published March 20, 2006 [click on my signature for live link]:

"...Iraq through a 911 Lens

RS): I want to revisit what we briefly touched upon with regard to the Iraq war and pre-war intelligence, but I want to continue from a different vantage point. Let's begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Do you think the attacks could have been and should have been avoided? Were there enough warnings? If so, where did the failure, in your opinion, occur?

ML): Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place. As I said at the time. The key to the terror structure was and is Iran, and we should have started by supporting democratic revolution in Iran, not invading any place. And even if you decided to 'do' Iraq first, it should have been political first, and military second-if-necessary. I proposed declaring the 'no fly zones' to be 'free Iraq,' and then dropping leaflets on the country urging Iraqis to go govern themselves, preparing for the fall of the regime..."

What, you don't believe him?