Welcome to the second Carnival of the Vanities of 2006, and the second since the CoTV is under new management with HarshlyMellow. Check out last week’s Carnival for all the bloggy goodness, and to read Zeuswood’s philosophy about the Carnival

What’s bizarre is that the FDA, a major federal agency, has, during the Bush Administration, been giving Public Citizen free rein. When one of my fellow bloggers at Making Light phoned the FDA to ask how one would go about getting the Cylert ruling reversed, their first-level flak-catcher told him in so many words to go to Public Citizen, since “They have a lot of influence on FDA policy.”

That doesn’t make sense. Those guys shouldn’t be running the store. Public Citizen has long been known as a secretive, controversial, publicly unresponsive bunch of weirdo zealots, a wholly owned subsidiary of that greedy, destructive, vindictive, grossly irresponsibly monster of vanity, Ralph Nader.

The extent to which the mainstream left Does Not Love Ralph Nader is way beyond the scope of this comment.

The left has a long history of supporting diversity and personal choice in medical treatment. That’s the truth. You can look it up. What’s going on with Cylert is an administrative screwup on the part of the FDA, and yetanother piece of inscrutable power-tripping by Public Citizen. It’s hardly the first time Public Citizen’s done this. If you want to hear an interesting rant, talk to an EMT about their “needle safety” campaign.

You’d think the federal government would want to make a drug available that keeps about 10,000 narcoleptics and who knows how many ADHD cases paying taxes rather than collecting disability.

Finally, I just want to say that liberal/progressive politics are a real-world thing: finite, knowable, practicable, and having not a lot of resemblance to the bizarro caricature liberalism I keep hearing about from the right. There’s plenty of stupidity in the world that doesn’t have a thing to do with leftism. Some of it doesn’t even have anything to do with the right-wingers. It’s just stupidity: an intractable enough problem without dragging in partisan politics.

Cheers –

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Liberals would fight for your right to “Death with Dignity” but the second you want to ride a motorcycle without a helmet they cry like school-girls. So the lesson I am supposed to learn is that I should be allowed to end my life but not be allowed to risk my life.

I thought freedom and liberty were supposed to be superlatives? How is it we the people can seize our freedom and enshrine it in a document only to give it back in dribs and drabs.

Democrats’ position on privacy is far from coherent, as Coyote Blog demonstrates with dozens of examples. Of course, the same is true for Republicans. The difference is that, with the exception of its religious zealots (who themselves are no better…