The Rake Magazine

Some pills make you taller and some pills make you small

If you didn't get a big enough laugh out of Bush's petty moralizing at his stem cell research funding veto ceremony, here's one for you:

Tim (I'm Only Looking Out for You) Pawlenty thinks the frequent television ads for prescription drugs are too much.

Yup, Tim's bravely willing to fight the power of the pharmaceutical industry's massive lobbying and political contribution muscle to make sure you're properly informed by your doctor about which sleep or erection inducing medicine you should take. (Don't forget, too, that the ads won't tell you in which order to take said medicine, depending on your wife's mood.)

Tim thinks that too many people are just going into their doctor and saying, "Gimme some of the uppers for my johnson and downers for afterwards," without the benefit of an actual consultation with the expert on the other end of the prescription pen.

Tim, if you're want to start regulating advertising that's injurious to our health, you really ought to start with Coca Cola and all the rest of the crap that's full of high fructose corn syrup.

Maybe if all those men who have lifestyle-induced diabetes ever ate a vegetable or took a walk, they wouldn't have the infrequent erections and frequent urination that are keeping them awake in the first place. That will solve a lot of the pill problems right there.

Bush to stem cell researchers: "Up yours!"

Well, it was a bit strange today to see Bush drag out the veto stamp for the first time in his presidency to kill the funding for stem cell research. "It crosses a moral boundary that our society needs to respect, so I vetoed it," he said to the applause of hundreds of TV evangelists.

Let's not fool ourselves about what happened here. The Congress, up for election in a few months, can read the polls and see that the people want stem cell research to help provide an answer to so many medical questions. The President, on the other hand, who, thank God, will never have to again resort to stealing votes in Florida, Ohio, and the Supreme Court to win an election, was free to cater to the party's conservative religious base and stand up for the unborn detritus of treatments for infertile women.

Yes, Bush staked out the simplistic moral high ground on this issue, just as he did in Iraq. It's just that things aren't always that simple. While he's saving the unborn, he just can't seem to get excited by the reports that the pace of civilian deaths in Iraq now seems to be accelerating, or that Lebanon seems to be on fire, or that Iran, Syria and North Korea seem to be able to do pretty much exactly as they please without the deterrence provided by any credible leadership from the "World's Only Superpower.(TM)"

As we scrape the unused fertilized embryos down the lab drain instead of using them for research, I know I'm going to sure be thankful that he have such a moral man at the helm.