CARMONA NOT GLUE

You probably have gotten the idea that most of us at DWT have rushed out to see SiCKO and rushed back greatly moved and bubbling over with enthusiasm for Moore's important, even crucial, work. Every American ought to see this movie, although I kind of wish foreigners wouldn't. I suspect that an awful lot of the kinds of Republicans who get all their ideas talking points from the Hannitys and Coulters and O'Reillys and Limbaughs won't believe any of it. It just doesn't fit with the Corporate America propaganda we've been fed all our lives. I wonder if they'll believe Admiral Richard H. Carmona though.

Admiral Carmona, better known as U.S. Surgeon General Carmona, is talking about health care too. He's not a lot like Michael Moore, but he seems headed for the same place. This morning's NY Times points out one thing he and Moore certainly have in common: that the Bush Regime is a very grave threat to the health and welfare of Americans.

Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.

That would be the Kennedys, the family of the former U.S. president who is admired by roughly 4 times as many Americans as the current occupant of the White House. “I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said. Dr. Carmona is just one of what the Times says is "a growing list" of present and former voices from inside the secretive Regime "to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan government health and scientific agencies." Carmona's six immediate predecessors, both Democrats and Republicans, agree that he faced far more political interference than any of them had. "On issue after issue, Dr. Carmona said, the administration made decisions about important public health issues based solely on political considerations, not scientific ones."

Earlier today Noah talked about how CNN tried to bury Michael Moore's movie by manipulating statistics to falsely claim that the film was "fudged." This morning when I woke up, CNN had some hack from the Bush Regime undercutting Dr. Carmona's testimony yesterday by claiming it was all "sour grapes." How wedded is CNN to the dying Regime? And when we finally get to bury Bush, Cheney and the rest of this wart on the ass of American history, do we get to bury CNN with them? Not likely.


UPDATE: WAXMAN TO THE RESCUE

Under a normal presidency this would never have to happen-- and, in fact, it never has happened-- but under these circumstances, someone had to do something! Ergo: Henry Waxman's Surgeon General's Independence Act. I wonder if the GOP will obstruct this too. After all, if it's good for normal Americans, they're against it.