Watch all you rambling blogs of pleasure

And ladies of easy leisure;
We must say “Adios!” until we see Almeria once again…

(Oh, what a fantastic song. In my mind, this song plays at all the dances in Heaven.)

Hi people. My monitor has decided that now would be an excellent time to wig out, and only works properly for brief intervals prompted by lifting it, pressing on its face, propping it up unevenly on comic books, and other irksome home remedies. So I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to post in the coming days. We’ll see. For now, here is a blogwatch….

erudito: Why did Rome fall? …Comments-thread fun, via Oxblog, I haven’t read yet due to aforementioned monitor madness.

And from the Washington Post:

…Heit is a doctor. Today he’s a pain and addiction specialist in Fairfax, but once he was an up-and-coming gastroenterologist, a football player, a jock. That was before his auto accident, the one that changed his life and taught him about pain problems the very hard way — as a patient who often didn’t get the help he so badly needed.

The doctor still spends a lot of time in his wheelchair, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming a prominent practitioner and lecturer over the past decade. More recently, his profession and personal history have propelled him to the center of a contentious national dispute that he virtually personifies.

On one side, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Justice Department — alarmed by the seemingly widespread diversion of opium-based prescription drugs such as OxyContin and Dilaudid to addicts and abusers — have investigated, arrested and prosecuted as “drug dealers” scores of pain doctors who allegedly misused their authority to write prescriptions for narcotic painkillers. On the other side, many pain doctors and patients have protested the DEA’s approach as overly aggressive and punitive, saying that it’s unfairly penalizing pain patients.

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I really hope pro-lifers can get together with libertarians on this one. The demand for euthanasia is driven not only by an ideology that despises neediness, but also by the much more practical and easily-attacked problem of underprescription of pain medication.