the first presidential debate

My mother and I spent dinner last night detailing the various ways in which we would occupy ourselves in order not to watch the debate. We're both registered Democrats in PA with a history of disliking Bush policies (both Bushes, mind you) and we're taking the unusual focus upon "women in swing states" with some gnashing of teeth. (In fact, pollsters have called our house three times in the past two weeks.) We know who the candidates are, thank you for asking. We have heard enough about Iraq to make us physically ill. So, last night we knew that watching the debate could only result in raising our blood-pressure to dangerous levels. Mom had planned on watching Gaudy Night because in her words, she was feeling "very self-righteous and Harriet Vane-like." (Which is an interesting comment in and of itself, considering that she has never read the book. The book, which everyone who has seen the Petherbridge adaptation knows, is very much the superior form of entertainment. She prides herself on the fact that she exposed me to Sayers, but has only read one book, Murder Must Advertise, and didn't even finish it, explaining that the cricket match was too complicated for her to follow. Sorry about the mini-rant, but it is a bit crackers.)

We were NOT going to watch the debate. So, of course, we both ended up watching it. working ourselves into a right state in the process of listening commentators' remarks, and desperately needing to watch The Daily Show in order to laugh it out so that we could get some kind of sleep. If you are into specifics, both candidates seem to have mis-spoken upon occasion. But last night, Kerry was a clear winner while Dubya seemed to have more trouble forming sentences than usual.

I think Iraq has been beaten to death. They wanted to go, they went without proof of agression or validation from the rest of the world. They screwed up, they won't admit it. They said we're done, we're still there. It's a bloody mess and no one wants to take the blame (except, perhaps, the CIA who seem to have become Bush's personal whipping boy). What I don't know enough about is their domestic policies- and that's scary. They can massacre people in Iraq under the guise of "freedom fighting" all they like and it doesn't affect my day-to-day living. The cost of drugs, Patriot acts that take away civil liberties, unemployment... these things worry me and they worry me even more because no one's addressing them.

My brother, lucky kid, got to see Michael Moore yesterday. (Which is another oddity, because up until recently I thought I was the only one in my household that watched him. Yes, back from the days of The Awful Truth, even. And I say until recently, because I've turned my mother on to his last two doc's.) And yesterday's Inquirer had Mr. Moore badgering local pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline for his new doc on health-care. Mom, who works for another pharm. company and had monitored for Glaxo once upon a time, assumes that he was probably trying to talk to them about Paxil, which had some of its crucial drug studies suppressed. The subject matter, of course, launched Mom into a professional rant, which I shall paraphrase:

The cost of drugs are so ridiculously high because drug companies are desperate to recoup their losses on the making of the drug. The company only has a patent life of 17 years on the compound. When it expires, other companies are allowed then to make a generic, possibly less effective, brand, with which they run only one clinical study at most to test that it doesn't kill people, and then sell it for pennies. At the same time, the generic company makes a ridiculous profit even while selling their drugs for pennies, because their costs are chump-change compared to what the original company had to spend to develop the drug. The development process generally takes a considerable amount of time before the drug's approved, so the original company is trying to recoup billions of dollars in roughly 3 years- hence the high price of drugs. Mom's solution for the government, presented free of charge is that the government set the patent start date when the drug is approved, not when it goes into development (status quo). That way, the drug companies a) don't have to charge an arm and a leg for their drugs and still recoup the cost before generics swoop in, and b) will allow drugs to be properly screened before making to the public, averting the Paxil disaster of rushing a drug into the market without being properly tested. More drugs have been taken off the market in recent years than ever before because they're being rushed through development.

So Mr. Moore, if you should be reading this, know that my mom would be more than pleased to talk to you.