2 days agoTo make a point no one should have to make: earlier this year, a deranged Army sergeant named John Russell opened fire near a combat stress clinic — sound familiar? — at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty and killed five of his fellow soldiers. No one speculated about any religious motivations. No one suggested he was part of an enemy “infiltration,” or suggested that U.S. troops have been “brainwashed.” Everyone understood that Russell was a deranged lunatic, not an advance scout for a conspiracy to subvert the military internally. It’s funny how double standards work.
Actually, no. It’s disgusting.
November 6, 2009
October 7, 2009
“ Texas justice is essentially sorcery, and there will be people who say that we can perfect it, that we can close the loop-holes. They’re wrong. The problem isn’t with loopholes—it’s with us. We are fallible. Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that—it under-girds their entire philosophy. They don’t think government can perfect much of anything. What makes them think we can perfect murder?
September 1, 2009
“ If Obama agrees to use reconciliation [to pass healthcare reform], he will permanently affix himself to the liberal wing of his party and permanently alienate independents.
Brooks is wrong here. Reconciliation is a procedural manuever thta would allow the bill to pass with a bare majority rather than the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster. (Without Ted Kennedy, 50 votes is now a majority.) It’s absurd to insist that a majority of the Senate is the “liberal wing” of the Democratic party.
(via squashed)
More than that, i don’t remember Brooks pitching a fit when the Republicans used reconciliation to push through Bush’s tax cuts. Then again, it’s hard to find someone who believes in the “It’s OK if you’re a Republican” philosophy more than David fucking Brooks.
2 months ago
August 18, 2009
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Big domestic programs (other than tax cuts) are nearly impossible [to pass]. The Bush people went 0-for-2 on big domestic proposals. It’s difficult to turn immigration reform or Social Security privatization into a war against the worst enemy ever.
For all the talk about how Congress did whatever Bush wanted—and they did—he didn’t pass much of import domestically, aside from the big tax cuts (something else that’s always easy to pass) and (EDIT) Medicare Part D, a big corporate give-away (these are also relatively easy to pass). The last president to have success with ambitious domestic policy initiatives was probably LBJ.
Castigating Obama for not being another LBJ seems a little unfair to me.
SEC to retreat on tweet ban
2 months agoYou’re at a South Carolina football game, sitting in the sun at Williams-Brice Stadium. South Carolina scores, and as the fans go wild, you tweet to your buddies, “Touchdown, Gamecocks!”
Oops, there’s a flag on that play. All social networking at games is against SEC rules. Gamecocks can’t tweet.
Or can they? The Southeastern Conference told The Observer on Monday that the conference is revising what might be college sports’ most restrictive policy on social media. Why? Because of the negative reaction in the media and on social media.
Ok, i understand why they might have a problem with videos from the game, but tweets? That just seems absurd. How would you even crack down on such a thing? How do they know if someone sent it from the stadium or the bar down the street? Does the SEC really have the man power to track this kind of thing down? So many questions.
August 12, 2009
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The insight that people need food has not led us to simply deregulate the agricultural sector (though that might be a good idea for other reasons) or change the tax treatment of food purchases or make it easier for rich people to donate to food banks, which is what Mackey recommends for health care. It’s led us to solve, or try and solve, the problem directly by giving people money to buy food. And that works. These programs, as every Whole Foods shopper knows, haven’t grown to encompass the whole population or set prices in grocery stores. If you have more money, you shop for food on your own. And if you have a lot of money, you shop at Mackey’s stores. That’s pretty much the model we’re looking at in health care.
Mackey, playing to type, has offered a Whole Foods solution for health care: It makes the system even better for the rich and the young and the educated — the sort of people who shop at Whole Foods, in other words — and doesn’t do a lot for those who really need help. Mackey has learned a lot over the past few decades about how to serve them. But Whole Foods is a grocery story for people who have money, not people who need food. And the correct analogy for health care is not people who can shop at Whole Foods. It’s people who need food.
Ezra Klein, responding to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s WSJ op-ed.
2 months ago
August 11, 2009
On Rationing
2 months agoAs John Holbo suggests, one of the odder elements of the health care debate is that conservative appear to have concocted a special one-off meaning of the term “rationing” to apply to government guarantees of basic health insurance coverage. They observe that insofar as the government guarantees basic health insurance coverage to everyone, the government probably can’t actually deliver an unlimited quantity of health care services without breaking the bank. Therefore, at some point someone will probably not get some service he or she might want. This is rationing and it’s evil and the solution, for unclear reasons, is for the government to deliver no guaranteed services whatsoever since … well . . it’s not clear how that’s better since either way you could still pay out of pocket.
Conservatives don’t talk about anything else in this way. The United States Postal Service provides certain kinds of guaranteed mail delivery services. It will not, however, just do anything mail-related that you might want. This doesn’t lead to “rationing” of parcel delivery services, it leads to the existence of private sector shipping companies that you can pay to do other stuff for you.
Similarly, your kid is entitled to go to a public school. They’ll teach him reading and writing and some science and history and probably Spanish or French or some such. But in the vast majority of places, you can’t have your kid taught Japanese at taxpayer expense. Again, though, we don’t live in a dystopian universe of “language rationing” in which it’s impossible to learn Japanese, you’d just have to pay someone else to do it. We of course could ban the market in private foreign language instruction, but it’s not clear why we would do that, and the existence of public sector provision of Spanish language instruction doesn’t in any sense imply a ban on the teaching of other foreign languages. What’s more, even if you’re incredibly troubled by the fact that today’s poor children don’t have the chance to learn Japanese in public school it’s still the case that eliminating public schools and lowering taxes isn’t going to leave those kids any better off. They still won’t know Japanese and now they also won’t be able to read.
August 10, 2009
“ Men feel slighted when a woman offers up only her friendship and not her body because — and this is what most “nice guys” cannot bear to admit — they don’t really want to be friends with her. They want to fuck her and friendship is simply the “investment” they have to make to reach the desired result. And it is really, truly shocking how hostile and venomous some self-described nice guys become when their efforts are thwarted.
August 5, 2009
Health care for profit: sometimes scary
And today the Times has a piece on an even more disturbing practice, utilized by drug companies:
Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.
The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia. That supposed medical consensus benefited Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that paid a medical communications firm to draft the papers, as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.
But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older patients.
I don’t know whether or not paying ghostwriters counts as R&D spending.
Last October i asked Jeff Miller what the Libertarian plan for health care reform would be and one of his suggestions was to get rid of the FDA. I wonder how he feels about such an idea these days.
3 months agoLaura Ling’s emotional homecoming press conference.
3 months ago