Office of the Independent Blogger

If I may, I’d like to announce the unveiling of my poetry. I’ve posted a ton of it on the page just linked, as I have written a ton and figured I’d share.

I have a couple of thoughts: first, Joe Lieberman lost his primary battle in Connecticut, and he is, barring a successful run as an independent, at an end to his Senatorial career. I’m sad to see it, as I never liked his opponent and always liked Joe, but it happened, and it’s time to put up the speechbook. However, there is an orchestrated campaign currently to “unseat” Joe Lieberman from his current committee seats, and I have a major problem with this. Until his opponent is sworn in, Joe is a Senator, and deserves to be treated as such. Lieberman will always have my respect and admiration. I do think his attempts to win as an independent are misguided, but at the same time, I’d vote for him. If he wins, good. If not, it’s still all right. If he causes a Republican to win the state of Connecticut, that’s fine by me, too. Lieberman has every right to run, and every reason to want to settle the score with Lamont. If he’d like to take the fight to the entire state, rather than just the people in the Party, I can’t say I blame him, and I wish him every bit of luck. He’ll certainly need it!

In the Middle East, the Israeli Cabinet has okayed a deeper invasion of Lebanon, and the White House has too, presumably. As I have been with this entire War at every stage, I am disappointed, but that’s to be expected when this President is involved.

Here in Illinois, the Tribune reports that there are serious problems in regulating Doctors, but the Department in charge of this says, naturally, that the problems aren’t serious, just minor. Of course they’d say that. Personally, whenever I hear of this sort of thing, I wonder why the state doesn’t have a better centralized database. It can’t possibly be that hard to create a network of computers, can it? No reason for this sort of thing to happen regarding doctors.

The FDA made an interesting announcement recently, and I’ve got a few thoughts.

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday said it has formed an internal task force to focus on the use of nanotechnology materials in drugs, medical instruments, and other products regulated by the agency. “As this exciting new area of science develops, FDA must be positioned to address both health promotion and protection challenges that it may present,” the agency’s acting commissioner, Andrew von Eschenbach, said in a statement. “Through this task force, we are leveraging our expertise and resources to guide the science and technology in the development of nanotechnology-based applications.”

I’m not sure what the purpose of this task force is. The FDA’s job is to regulate; it isn’t in their line of duty to create new medicines or innovate technology, is it? Does this then mean that, before this task force was assembled, the FDA didn’t have a panel that focused on nanotechnology? If so, that’s crying incompetence, but I’ll be writing the FDA in a moment with my questions, and if they answer, I’ll post it here. If they don’t, then we can make assumptions.

On an apolitical, final note, a truckful of penguins flipped over and they died. Sad day.