I'm sorry it hurts when Snow takes a crap but come on! Lots of people have had cancer and can talk about it without breaking down and blubbering just when they coincidentally need someone's sympathy (in this case, the sympathy of a bunch of corporate media whores who eat this kind of hackneyed farce up on a daily basis).

Maybe if Republicans and their capitalist supporters stopped poisoning the environment there would be a lot less people dying of cancer and moaning when they crap and wearing retarded yellow bracelets! (I must be out of it because this thing of wearing a bracelet to announce you had a disease is completely new to me - what exactly is the point? Just when I think America can't get any weirder. . .)

Also, where I come from we don't tell children's stories about tar babies (again, never heard of it) but we certainly do refer to black children that way if we want to be a little scandalously racist . . .

I looked up the "tar baby" reference which Snow used twice in his initial outing as WH press Secretary. It does indeed refer to a sticky situation. It also has racial conotations. For him to use this term twice seems at best strange and at worst calculated. He had to know that this was not the best term to use. If he was a speechwriter, then I'd say it was intentional, not off the cuff. And I think it was an unfortunate choice given the fact that we're debating the future of lots of brown people with the immigration issue. Add to that the Fox News people like O'Reilly and Gibson basically saying we need to support the white power structure, and it seems like some kind of race baiting.

After 5 years of the lier in chief and the sycophantic press, call me cynical, but Tony Snow's tears for himself don't pass muster as anything meaningful. Please.

A normal intelligent, science-minded person might look at the body of research showing that the active ingredents in marijuana kill at least ten different types of cancer cells, and ask the question:

Do stoners get less cancer than the people who hate them?

Everybody symapthizes with the poor person who already has cancer and needs pot to cope with the horrific side effects of conventional cancer treatments.

But it's popular now on both the left and right to look at stoners with contempt and derision and look aside and not care when they have their homes invaded by paramilitary squads or get raped in jail.

For anyone who is still interested in the above question, I know of two studies that have found part of the answer.

1. Back in the nineties, a British group studying the correlation between past drug use and incidence of lymphoma found that current or past stoners had a 20% smaller risk of developing lymphoma than the control group.

2. Recently, Dr. Donald Tashkin of UCLA studied the lung cancer patient database for Los Angeles County, and found no correlation between lung cancer and marijuana smoking.

In fact, at a conference he showed the very controversial result that stoners seem to have a 20% less chance of developing lung cancer than people who do not smoke at all.

As we saw from the tragic case of Dana Reeve, people who don't smoke do get lung cancer.

Apparently, people who smoke pot get less lung cancer than people who don't smoke at all.

That's consistent with the observation that THC kills lung cancer cells in vitro.

This science lifts the marijuana issue into a whole different territory from the normal medical marijuana issue of treating the side effects of treatment for people who have ALREADY contracted cancer.

Maybe our national contempt for stoners is costing our society a lot more than just the basic financial cost of arresting them and giving them tickets or locking them up with violent sex criminals and treating them for rape trauma afterwards.

But it seems like in America, contempt for stoners trumps curiousity about cancer.

Poor Tony Snow.

As a survivor of cancer, crying is the absoluetly appropriate reaction to this administration.

It's a fact that the government research trying to prove pot was carcinogenic actually proved that THC killed breast cancer cells -- back in 1976.

The research was kept secret deliberately because the feds thought it might encourage the people to smoke pot.

Isn't that kind of sick?

Wow, this country hates on stoners so much, they prefer breast cancer instead.

I think that's also the editorial policy at Salon.

Because they're not itching to tell you any of this, either.

Colorectal cancer cells have just been added to the list of cancer cells known to be killed by the active ingredients in marijuana.

You can find more complete information in this Nature review by noted cancer research Dr. Manuel Guzman:

http://www.kubby.com/Guzman-Cancer-nrc1188.pdf

The other types of cancer cells known to be shrunk or killed by the active ingredients in marijuana are:

1. Lung cancer

2. Glioma (that's a deadly brain cancer)

3. Thyroid epithelioma

4. Lymphoma/leukaemia

5. Skin carcinoma

6. Uterus carcinoma

7. Breast carcinoma

8. Prostate carcinoma

9. Neuroblastoma

Oh -- it's also been discovered that cannabinoids prevent herpes viruses from turning into cancr. That's in a different report.

The active ingredients in pot kill cancer through two different pathways -- inducing apotosis and inhibiting angiogenesis -- which an amazing feat for a molecule synthesized by a common weed.

But now we have a colorectal cancer patient shilling for a President who not only disregards the science that has been done, but actively impedes further research into the subject.

If I were a cancer survivor, I'd cry too.

Thank you V, for a well-reasoned rebuttal(?) to my letter below.

I grew up in the South and left as soon as I was able. I lived among some mean and ignorant bigots and heard almost the whole catalog of racial slurs, but I swear I never heard Tar Baby as reference to a Black child. I was however, lulled to sleep by my grammy to the tales of Uncle Remus.

I don't doubt your word that some cretin somewhere would use the term Tar Baby as a racial slur, but in my life experience, I never heard it uttered by any that I met.

If they wanted to slur a Black child, they would call him a Pickaninny, not a Tar Baby.

Just because a cretinous semi-literate racist misuses the English language doesn't mean that I have to stop using a word in it's proper meaning. I will not let them confiscate a well-used and well-understood word and usurp it for their own warped purposes.

Indeed, a bitch is still a female canine and that's the term still properly used at dog shows and with dog breeders. They are not about to give up the word's proper meaning just because some ghetto jerks refer to women in that way. A spade is still a term for one of the four cardinal suites of playing cards and continues to be properly referred to as such. Card players are not about to be intimidated by some politically correct nincompoop who hears a racial slur in the word.

If we start going down that self-censoring path where we must stop using common words just because some idiot misuses them, we'll eventually find that our rich lexicon will have to be bowdlerized and a speaker will have to walk on eggshells for fear of using any word that a racist moron comes up with to smear someone. And believe me, at the rapid rate racists of all colors seem to adopt common words as racist epithets, and at the rate politically correct scolds aid and abet them by being shocked and offended over phrases like Tar Baby, we are going to have to consult a modern slang dictionary before any public speaking engagement.

I'm not going to let the racists win, and I'm not going to let the hypersensitive speech police put themselves in charge of what I can or cannot say in public.

I would be niggardly to do otherwise.