The New York Times has a story on Kern County, whose conservative rural residents, live-off-the-land values and devotion to the Republican Party make it an odd forum for voter rebellion. And yet medical marijuana advocates are gaining purchase in the county with a petition drive to challenge a pot ban passed unanimously in August by the county’s all-Republican Board of Supervisors. Now a team of emergency medicine specialists from the U.K. and Down Under has published a study that proposed to expand the repertoire. The setting was a meeting of the Australian College of Ambulance Professionals in Auckland, New Zealand, where the researchers recruited 74 men and women. It's true that the devil of reform is always in the tax-code details, and something would have to be done to protect the Subchapter S corporations that pay at the individual tax rate of 35%. But the super committee happens to include the chairmen of both tax-writing committees—Democrat Max Baucus of Senate Finance and Dave Camp of Ways and Means. Their staffs have the knowledge to pull off the details if the political will exists. And the WSJ's "guess" is based on ... what? In 2007, 92 percent of Medicare's age-65+ beneficiaries rated their coverage as better than "fair" or "poor." So what the WSJ disparages as the unfashionable "status quo," American seniors give a huge thumbs up.
