1 Boring Old Man

I seem to be fixated on what’s happened to Psychiatry [Dr. Nemeroff et al] and the story of Bishop Eddie Long. What connects the two? A couple of things. They both are about corruption of something that matters in the world – mental health, spiritual health. But there’s another connection – an unlikely one for me: Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican Senator from Iowa. He’s a member of The Family and counseled Senator Ensign and Mark Sanford at C-Street in Washington. Besides being a strong religious right figure, he’s a Conservative Republican extraordinaire. I expect if he and I met, we’d have trouble finding anything that we might agree about except what follows in the next paragraph. And yet, he’s my current favorite Senator, bar none. And even though I can’t understand his affinity for the current Republican Party, I expect if he ran in Georgia, I’d vote for him.

Why? It’s because as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he’s taken on the corruption of Academic Medicine by the Pharmaceutical Industry [Dr. Charles Nemeroff] and the flim-flam world of the Prosperity Gospel people [Benny Hinn, Paula White, Eddie Long, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, and Kenneth Copeland, the worst of the lot]. Charles Grassley is an Oversight king, doing what Senators are meant to do. And the job isn’t done. While he’s the ranking member of the Finance Committee, he hasn’t been Chairman since 2006, but that hasn’t slowed him down at all. It was his power and his investigator’s expertise [Paul Thacker] that finally brought down Dr. Nemeroff in 2008. The religious leaders have been stonewalling turning over their financial records, but the case is ongoing.

So it’s time for Grassley’s term on the Senate Finance Committee to expire. I’ve been lamenting his leaving and having his right-hand man move on. I wrote a friend about my concerns, concerns he shared. Today he forwarded me a piece about that very issue [ht to Dr. Carroll of Healthcare Renewall for sending it on]. It’s from a pay-to-view site, so I’ll summarize it in my own words. It says that Grassley is looking to move to the Judiciary Committee where he can continue his oversight interests in Health Care and the FDA. Judiciary is over the FDA and the DOJ, so that puts Grassley in a position for oversight of enforcement. Senator Tom Harkin [D-IA] on the Finance Committee has a growing interest in healthcare oversight and has set up an investigative unit for that purpose. There’s more in the article that’s too Washington insidery for the likes of me, but the overall tenor of the article was encouraging. They’re not dropping the ball, or so it seems. It’s Grassley Likely To Shift FDA Oversight To Enforcement In The 112th.