The spin phrase an insurance industry executive used in a recent New York Times article is "controlling utilization."

The article, ultimately, was about the insurance industry's workers licking their wounds after bearing the brunt of what they feel are unfair attacks by health care reform advocates.

So, I'll ask you to do this: The next time you pay $1,000 for a test your doctor ordered -- on top of the thousands you and your employer already pay in premiums each year; the next time your pharmacy tells you the insurance company won't pay for a full prescription (oh, and that'll be $150); the next time you receive a bill from your doctor's office when you though your bill was covered ...

Go easy on the sweet innocents at the insurance company. They're just trying to protect their triple didget profits so their CEO can get that jet he's been lusting after and so the company's shareholders will stay off their back.

Say what you want to say about South Carolina's poor choice of governor, but come tomorrow, it's going to be a lot cheaper to go shop at Wal-Mart in Fort Mill or Rock Hill than any of the 500 locations in Mecklenburg County or anywhere else in North Carolina.

Thanks to Gov. Bev Perdue, our poor choice of a governor, and the General Assembly, there is a new sales tax going into effect Sept. 1.

According to the Charlotte Observer, this is supposed to be a temporary fix for the state's poor economy.

The tax hike, passed by the N.C. legislature this summer, is expected to raise $803.5 million.

It is supposed to expire in 2011. However, a 2001 sales tax increase characterized as “temporary” is still in effect.

Basically, Mecklenburg County is now overtaxed. And with all of the job loss in this area, people running out of unemployment benefits, this is something we can't afford.

The drinkers and smokers are going to pay too. But guess who drinks and smokes more than anyone else -- poor, stressed out people who are worried about their money. Lawmakers seem to forget that you can't collect sales tax if people aren't buying things and that's what we should start doing around the state, stop buying things  -- especially here in the great state of Mecklenburg.

It would be different if the state gave Charlotte its due. But drive down (or up) any road the state is supposed to upkeep and your car tires will tell you that the state is holding out on us. So this "temporary" sales tax is supposed to do what? Break those of us who are already broke?

Maybe it's time skip the N.C. sales tax racket and head to South Carolina to buy groceries, clothes and other items that are just too much here and see how well this increased sales tax works for the state then.

Um. We'll see. For now, here's some promising science for pot smokers to rejoice over: The same doctor who concluded that marijuana was toxic in the '70s now says it may cause malignant cells to die instead of multiply. (Translated: It may make cancer go away.)

How did that happen? Well, he took a second look. He was actually trying to prove that ganja causes cancer when his research proved otherwise.

To that we say: Puff puff pass, don't be a Bogart.

One in three Americans will be afflicted with cancer, we are told by the government (as if it’s our immutable fate and somehow acceptable). Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the U.S. and lung cancer the leading killer among cancers.

You’d think it would have been very big news in June 2005 when UCLA medical school professor Donald Tashkin reported that components of marijuana smoke -- although they damage cells in respiratory tissue -- somehow prevent them from becoming malignant. In other words, something in marijuana exerts an anti-cancer effect!

Tashkin has special credibility. He was the lead investigator on studies dating back to the 1970s that identified the components in marijuana smoke that are toxic. It was Tashkin et al. who published photomicrographs showing that marijuana smoke damages cells lining the upper airways. It was the Tashkin lab’s finding that benzpyrene -- a component of tobacco smoke that plays a role in most lung cancers -- is especially prevalent in marijuana smoke. It was Tashkin’s data showing that marijuana smokers are more likely than non-smokers to cough, wheeze, and produce sputum.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, which supported Tashkin’s marijuana-related research over the decades, readily gave him a grant in 2002 to conduct a large, population-based, case-controlled study that would prove definitively that heavy, long-term marijuana use increases the risk of lung and upper-airways cancers.

What Tashkin and his colleagues found, however, disproved their hypothesis. (Tashkin is to marijuana as a cause of lung cancer what Hans Blix was to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction -- an honest investigator who set out to find something, concluded that it wasn’t there, and reported his results.)

Tashkin’s team interviewed 1,212 cancer patients from the Los Angeles County Cancer Surveillance program, matched for age, gender, and neighborhood with 1,040 cancer-free controls. Marijuana use was measured in “joint years” (number of years smoked times number of joints per day).

It turned out that increased marijuana use did not result in higher rates of lung and pharyngeal cancer, whereas tobacco smokers were at greater risk the more they smoked. Tobacco smokers who also smoked marijuana were at slightly lower risk of getting lung cancer than tobacco-only smokers.

As to the highly promising implication of his own study –that something in marijuana stops damaged cells from becoming malignant— Tashkin noted that an anti-proliferative effect of THC has been observed in cell-culture systems and animal models of brain, breast, prostate, and lung cancer. THC has been shown to promote apoptosis (damaged cells die instead of reproducing) and to counter angiogenesis (the process by which blood vessels are formed —a requirement of tumor growth). Other antioxidants in cannabis may also be involved in countering malignancy, said Tashkin.

More from AlterNet.org.

I was gonna write something else, but then I got high ...

President Obama: When I go to my childhood vacation spot, Gulfshores, Ala., I'm now forced to look at oil rigs. I think your friends in the Northeast can deal with a few wind turbines.

You promised us off-shore wind turbines, now get to it.

Reporting from Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and Washington -- For at least one more summer, vacationers on Martha's Vineyard won't be able to gaze across the water and see, far off on the horizon, the churning blades of offshore wind turbines -- no matter how badly the island's most famous current vacationer would like.

President Obama, now summering on the Massachusetts island with his family, is still at least a year away from seeing turbines take root anywhere off the U.S. coast, even though his administration promised to make offshore wind a priority and developers are lining up to string wind farms up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

His administration, delayed by controversy and red tape, has yet to grant a single permit for wind or solar development on public land, onshore or off.

More from The L.A. Times.

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