There are numbers, but the government shutdown makes them totally unreliable.
Have a funny:
Author: Matthew G. Saroff
Linkage
- What Concessions Republicans Ought to Be Forced to Make (The Rude Pundit) Today’s must read.
- TRYING TO GET A FOUR-WHEELER’S RESPECT, ON A BIKE (Joe Berkeley) Originally from the Boston Globe, it is an elegant solution to the problem of a biker of getting hassled by white guys in pickup trucks.
- Head of the European Central Bank Says that if we knew the truth, there would be a bank panic (Testosterone Pit)
Tom Hiddleston (Loki from the Avengers movie) does Loki (from the Avengers movie) as played by Owen Wilson.
Why the US Healthcare System Sucks Wet Farts from Dead Pigeons,
How many of you have an Albuterol inhaler for Asthma?
It’s great, isn’t it?
The drug is out of patent, so it’s cheap, and it works.
It’s not like a big pharma would lobby to get the FDA to ban the cheap inhalers because of their miniscule use of CFCs, and then wrap new propellants in a patent web and jack up the price, right?
Oh, silly me, that IS what they did:
The arsenal of medicines in the Hayeses’ kitchen helps explain why. Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, generally retails for over $175 in the United States, while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free of charge to asthma patients. Albuterol, one of the oldest asthma medicines, typically costs $50 to $100 per inhaler in the United States, but it was less than $15 a decade ago, before it was repatented.
“The one that really blew my mind was the nasal spray,” said Robin Levi, Hannah and Abby’s mother, referring to her $80 co-payment for Rhinocort Aqua, a prescription drug that was selling for more than $250 a month in Oakland pharmacies last year but costs under $7 in Europe, where it is available over the counter.
………
Unlike other countries, where the government directly or indirectly sets an allowed national wholesale price for each drug, the United States leaves prices to market competition among pharmaceutical companies, including generic drug makers. But competition is often a mirage in today’s health care arena — a surprising number of lifesaving drugs are made by only one manufacturer — and businesses often successfully blunt market forces.
Asthma inhalers, for example, are protected by strings of patents — for pumps, delivery systems and production processes — that are hard to skirt to make generic alternatives, even when the medicines they contain are old, as they almost all are.
………
But in the United States, even people with insurance coverage struggle. Lisa Solod, 57, a freelance writer in Georgia, uses her inhaler once a day, instead of twice, as usually prescribed, since her insurance does not cover her asthma medicines. John Aravosis, 49, a political blogger in Washington, buys a few Advair inhalers at $45 each during vacations in Paris, since his insurance caps prescription coverage at $1,500 per year. Sharon Bondroff, 68, an antiques dealer in Maine on Medicare, scrounges samples of Advair from local doctors. Ms. Bondroff remembers a time, not so long ago, when inhalers “were really cheap.” The sticker shock for asthma patients began several years back when the federal government announced that it would require manufacturers of spray products to remove chlorofluorocarbon propellants because they harmed the environment. That meant new inhaler designs. And new patents. And skyrocketing prices.
“That decision bumped out the generics,” said Dr. Peter Norman, a pharmaceutical consultant based in Britain who specializes in respiratory drugs. “Suddenly sales of the branded products went right back up, and since then it has not been a very competitive market.”
The chlorofluorocarbon ban even eliminated Primatene Mist inhalers, a cheap over-the-counter spray of epinephrine that had many unpleasant side effects but was at least an effective remedy for those who could not afford prescription treatments.
………
A result is that there are no generic asthma inhalers available in the United States. But they are available in Europe, where health regulators have been more flexible about mixing drugs and devices and where courts have been quicker to overturn drug patent protection.
“The high prices in the U.S. are because the F.D.A. has set the bar so high that there is no clear pathway for generics,” said Lisa Urquhart of EvaluatePharma, a consulting firm based in London that provides drug and biotech analysis. “I’m sure the brands are thrilled.”
………
And here is the money quote:
This year the price of Advair dropped 10 percent in France, but in pharmacies in the Bronx, it has doubled in the last two years.
For what it is worth this is not technically a failure of the free market.
These companies’ profit margins are being directly supported by the state. That is the nature of patents and other exclusive licenses that we grant, particularly in the drug industry.
Then we allow for these exclusive licenses to be extended ad infinitum through evergreening.
The problem is that we as a society allow people to patent nothing at all, and sometimes we grant exclusive right to people who didn’t invent anything at all, as in the case of colchicine, where exclusivity was granted for a study of the drug which consisted primarily of a survey of the historical literature.
The price of colcicine went from $0.09 a pill to $5.00 a pill.
The Can is Now Officially Kicked Down the Road
The House just passed the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling extension.
So, now we revisit the shut down in January, and the debt ceiling in February.
Woo hoo.
That being said, pretty much everyone but the Teabaggers are acknowledging that this is a big loss for said Teabaggers.
Sauce for the Gander
The reactionary wing of the Catholic Church, whose refrain under the reactionaries John Paul II and Benedict XVI was to say that obedience to the Pope is not optional, is now complaining that Pope Francis is considering how they feel about what he says:
Rattled by Pope Francis’s admonishment to Catholics not to be “obsessed” by doctrine, his stated reluctance to judge gay people and his apparent willingness to engage just about anyone — including atheists — many conservative Catholics areRattled by Pope Francis’s admonishment to Catholics not to be “obsessed” by doctrine, his stated reluctance to judge gay people and his apparent willingness to engage just about anyone — including atheists — many conservative Catholics are doing what only recently seemed unthinkable:
They are openly questioning the pope.
Concern among traditionalists began building soon after Francis was elected this spring. Almost immediately, the new pope told non-Catholic and atheist journalists he would bless them silently out of respect. Soon after, he eschewed Vatican practice and included women in a foot-washing ceremony.
The wary traditionalists became critical when, in an interview a few weeks ago, Francis said Catholics shouldn’t be “obsessed” with imposing doctrines, including on gay marriage and abortion. Then earlier this month, Francis told an atheist journalist that people should follow good and fight evil as they “conceive” of them. These remarks followed an interview with journalists this summer aboard the papal airplane in which the pope declared that it is not his role to judge someone who is gay “if they accept the Lord and have goodwill.”
Never mind that the pope has also made clear his acceptance of church doctrine, which regards gay sex and abortion as sins and bans women from the priesthood. Behind the growing skepticism is the fear in some quarters that Francis’s all-embracing style and spontaneous speech, so open as it is to interpretation, are undoing decades of church efforts to speak clearly on Catholic teachings. Some conservatives also feel that the pope is undermining them at a time when they are already being sidelined by an increasingly secular culture.
Gee, the shoe is on the other foot now. My heart bleeds borscht.
FWIW, I think that the new Pope IS undermining you and wants you sidelined, because he sees you as a threat to the church.
Obnoxious dogmatic intolerant f%$#s are not a selling point for the church.
As to any claim of morality, you lost that when you looked the other way at pedophile priests.
Linkage
- Air Gaps (Bruce Schneier) He gives instructions on how to make sure that your computer is not networked at all. (An air gap means no connection to the network)
- Vatican misspells Jesus on Pope Francis commemorative coins (The Independent) ROFLMAO
Mr. Fish: Thankfully – Mr. Fish mugs and t-shirts available.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? The IMF is calling for Taxing the Rich?!?!?!
I’m not joking. The IMF actually suggesting that countries need to tax the rich in order to reduce deficits and improve economies:
Tax the rich and better target the multinationals: The IMF has set off shockwaves this week in Washington by suggesting countries fight budget deficits by raising taxes.
Tucked inside a report on public debt, the new tack was mostly eclipsed by worries about the US budget crisis, but did not escape the notice of experts and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
“We had to read it twice to be sure we had really understood it,” said Nicolas Mombrial, the head of Oxfam in Washington. “It’s rare that IMF proposals are so surprising.”
Guardian of financial orthodoxy, the International Monetary Fund, which is holding its annual meetings with the World Bank this week in the US capital, typically calls for nations in difficulty to slash public spending to reduce their deficits.
But in its Fiscal Monitor report, subtitled “Taxing Times”, the Fund advanced the idea of taxing the highest-income people and their assets to reinforce the legitimacy of spending cuts and fight against growing income inequalities.
“Scope seems to exist in many advanced economies to raise more revenue from the top of the income distribution,” the IMF wrote, noting “steep cuts” in top rates since the early 1980s.
According to IMF estimates, taxing the rich even at the same rates during the 1980s would reap fiscal revenues equal to 0.25 percent of economic output in the developed countries.
“The gain could in some cases, such as that of the United States, be more significant,” around 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, said the IMF report, which also singled out deficient taxation of multinational companies.
I did not expect that the IMF would suggest this before pigs ……… Well, you know.
I guess they have been following the purchase levels of pitchforks and torches, and have become concerned.
Now if only they start supporting a Tobin Tax on financial transactions.
Awwwww!!!! The NSA Has a Sad.
Longtime NSA operatives feel that Barack Obama has not been vocal enough in supporting on their spying on the rest of us:
Gen. Keith Alexander and his senior leadership team at the National Security Agency (NSA) are angry and dispirited by what they see as the White House’s failure to defend the spy agency against criticism of its surveillance programs, according to four people familiar with the NSA chiefs’ thinking. The top brass of the country’s biggest spy agency feels they’ve been left twisting in the wind, abandoned by the White House and left largely to defend themselves in public and in Congress against allegations of unconstitutional spying on Americans.
“There has been no support for the agency from the President or his staff or senior administration officials, and this has not gone unnoticed by both senior officials and the rank and file at the Fort,” said Joel Brenner, the NSA’s one-time inspector general, referring to the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.
The weak backing from top administration officials has aggravated the relationship between Alexander and the White House, where he has never been warmly embraced. The NSA now finds itself without the strong, visible support of the President at a time of extraordinary political vulnerability, with the agency’s secrets laid bare and its future in doubt.
………
Obama has only made one set of substantial remarks about the NSA’s collection of Americans phone records and monitoring of Internet and email data, during a news conference in August. He did not distance himself from the programs, but he has not made a point of reminding the American people or lawmakers that he thinks they are vital. Neither the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, nor his top counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, have given any public remarks arguing that the NSA programs are legal and necessary. And no Cabinet official has mounted a concerted effort to back the agency in public.
Former intelligence officials who remain in regular contact with those still in government say that morale at the NSA is low, both because of the reaction to leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden, which put the normally secretive agency under intense scrutiny, and because of budget cutbacks and the continuing government shutdown, which has left some employees furloughed without pay.
Brenner, who also served as the government’s director of counterintelligence, said that Obama could have lifted morale had he gone to Fort Meade and made a speech vigorously defending the NSA’s work. “A president who had real feeling for the intelligence business and the people laboring in that vineyard would have paid them a visit,” Brenner said.
Instead, said former senior CIA official Mark Lowenthal, “They are hurting.”
Three words:
Suck
It
Up!!!!
It
Up!!!!
What a bunch of f%$#ing whiners.
Get over yourself.
The head of your agency (Keith Alexander) lies for you, and his boss (James Clapper) lies for you even more, and you are upset because Barack Obama isn’t playing cheerleader for the folks in Fort Meade.
Like the chicken said, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”
We Might All Be in Hell
NPR just finished a series where it talked to prominent theologians about the nature of the afterlife.
One of the segments was immediately followed (it might have been preceeded) by a story about the government shutdown and potential debt default.
Then it hit me: No one that they had talked to even mentioned the possibility that we might already be in hell.
Of course, Gnosticism, the religion that most closely hews to this philosophy, no longer exists as an organized religion, but it does seem to me that this is a reasonable conclusion.
As a Jew, I find the discussion of the afterlife largely irrelevant. The afterlife is simply not a significant of Jewish theology.
The consensus on the afterlife in Judaism is, “Yes,” with some people going with a conventional heaven and hell, and some people, particularly Kabbalists, believe in reincarnation, and a whole range in between.
In Judaism, the important thing is that to whatever degree our world resembles hell, it is our job to fix it.
This concept is called Tikkun olam (תיקון עולם).
This reminds me of an old joke:
A Shmuel dies and is sent to hell, and he boards an elevator going down.
The elevator operators calls out, “Hell, level 1, all Atheists and Agnostics out.”
Shmuel looks out, and sees a bleak landscape, black sands, and a merciless sun beating down, and the air smells like.
The elevator moves further downward, and comes to a stop.
“Hell, level 2, all Muslims out.”
Shmuel smells brimstone, hears screams, and sees rivers of flowing lava under a black sky.
Shmuel is now rather concerned.
The doors close with a sepulchral finality, and the elevator drops.
“Hell, all Christians out.”
The door opens, and Shmuel can see nothing but flames in front of the door. He can feel his skin blisters from the heat even as he pushes himself against the back of the elevator.
As the doors close, Shmuel is now terrified.
“Hell, all Jews out.
The doors open, Shmuel feels a cool breeze on his face. He sees lush, green rolling hills. He smells citrus in the air.
Shmuel is stunned. To no one in particular, he says, “But ……… I thought it would be worse!”
The elevator operator looks up, and says, “It was. You cannot believe what they can do with irrigation.
Perhaps we should all spend some more time irrigating.
Some People are Terrified by Women’s Sexuality
Case in point, the developers of a drug called, (I am not joking here) Lybrido, which is intended to increase sexual desire and response in women.
I don’t have a problem with this, though the idea that insufficient desire might be pathologized as hypoactive sexual-desire disorder (HSDD) is a bit troubling.
That being said, this following quote is even more troubling:
But of course swallowing a tablet can take us only so far. Chemically enhancing a woman’s desire might play out in all kinds of ways within a relationship. Some couples might feel closer, others might feel desolate because, despite more sex, their bond isn’t stronger. Wives might yearn for the old seductive efforts of their husbands, even if those gestures stopped working long ago. Women might feel yet more pressure to perform: Why not get that prescription? their partners might ask; why not take that pill? And men, if they are willing to confront the truth, might not be so happy about the reminder, as their partners reach for the pill bottle, that their women need chemical assistance to want them. All the agonies that have existed since the dawn of monogamy will still pertain, many of them coming down to the craving to feel special.
Beyond what might happen in millions of bedrooms, it’s even more difficult to foresee what societal transformations might be stirred. Just as with the birth-control pill, a foreboding not only about sex itself but also about female empowerment may be expressed in a dread of women’s sexual anarchy. Over the last decade, as companies chased after an effective chemical, there was fretting within the drug industry: what if, in trials, a medicine proved too effective? More than one adviser to the industry told me that companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering.
“You want your effects to be good but not too good,” Andrew Goldstein, who is conducting the study in Washington, told me. “There was a lot of discussion about it by the experts in the room,” he said, recalling his involvement with the development of Flibanserin, “the need to show that you’re not turning women into nymphomaniacs.” He was still a bit stunned by the entrenched mores that lay within what he’d heard. “There’s a bias against — a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman.”
Yes, giving 70 years erections to unleash upon the rest of society is a great profit center, but if women start wanting sex, it can create “societal splintering”.
So, men suddenly want to copulate with anything with a hole in it: Good.
Women wanting to have sex: Scary.
Someone needs to get their heads out of their ass.
What a Surprise, the New York Bank of the Federal Reserve is Completely Captured by the Vampire Squid*
Case in point, we have a bank examiner fired by the NY Fed because she refused to ignore the law to help Goldman Sachs:
In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.
Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.
That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.
Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.
“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”
Today, Segarra filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the New York Fed in federal court in Manhattan seeking reinstatement and damages. The case provides a detailed look at a key aspect of the post-2008 financial reforms: The work of Fed bank examiners sent to scrutinize the nation’s “Too Big to Fail” institutions.
Segarra does not allege that Goldman was involved in the Fed’s decision to fire her, and I’m inclined to agree.
The nature of regulatory capture is that the regulators do the bidding of those that they regulate without being asked.
The question is how we fix this.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
Why to Tell the Steve Israel and the DCCC That You Will Manage Your Own Campaign Donations
Because former Blue Dog Steve Israel has as his goal the resurrection of the Blue Dog Caucus or something very similar, even at the expense of the possibility of Democrats taking back the house:
Last week, when MoveOn and PPP released their much buzzed about polls showing how Democrats could pick up many seats, the first thing I noticed was that these were all the Steve Israel seats they had polled. I spoke with them and asked them to poll some of the districts that the DCCC studiously ignores, districts we’ve been covering here at DWT and where Blue America has some great candidates. This morning MoveOn and PPP are releasing new polling data for some of those districts.
Outstanding, at top Blue America races where Lee Rogers is ahead of Buck McKeon (CA-25), Paul Clements is ahead of Fred Upton (MI-06) and Jason Ritchie is ahead of Dave Reichert (WA-08). In other districts, like FL-27, where Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz have actively discouraged Democratic opponents, there is a clear indication that if Pelosi manned up and fired Israel and cleaned out the nest of self serving incompetents who run the DCCC, the Democrats would win back the House hands down in 2014. In many of the districts where there are no Democrats– thanks to Israel’s agenda– voters see no alternative to the GOP incumbent but there is a clear indication that a Democrat could campaign and win. In FL-27 where Wasserman Schultz has been protecting Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for years, if an election were held today, an unnamed Democrat would beat her 47-45%. ………
You can read the rest at the article, but basically, the DCCC will drop big bucks on ConservaDem long-shots, and ignore competitive races where real Democrats are running against vulnerable Republicans.
I Took Charlie to a Cubing Competition Today
A Geek in His Native Habitat
He got three personal bests, though on one of them, he missed the cut-off by 8/100 of a second.
I taped* all of his solves, 3×3, 4×4, 5×5, and one-handed 3×3, but these are the ones he put on his Youtube channel, because he thought that these were the most upload worthy.
I mostly acted as a camera man, and stayed out of his way while he hung out with his peeps.
No need to embarrass him by making his old fart dad to prominent.
*Not really taped, it was a digital video camera, but it’s a decent way to describe it.
Thank You Megan McArdle………
I frequently write about Meghan “Math is Hard” McArdle, and when I do, I frequently portray her as one of the most completely useless pundits out there. (which says a lot)
I have finally discovered that she serves a purpose. She is an excellent reverse barometer: If you reflexively disagree with her, you are almost certain to be right.
Case in point, her Op/Ed suggesting that police blotters should be made private.
Because some scumbags on the internet are posting people’s mugshots online, and demanding extortion a fee to remove the pictures, she wants to further restrict public records.
My initial reaction was, “I’m against it.”
Then I looked at her examples. They were all hipster trustifarians who got caught with a joint, or some X, or got busted for drunk driving, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and because daddy has some money, they lawyered up and got a deferred adjudication.
We as a society need to have this information, even if there are ratf%$#s are out there who are attempting extortion.
I knew I was right as soon as I knew that I disagreed with McArdle, and on closer examination this was confirmed.
Schwer zu Sein a Yid*
It appears that some folks from my wife’s old home town have been up to no good:
In Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, Mendel Epstein made a name for himself as the rabbi to see for women struggling to divorce their husbands. Among the Orthodox, a divorce requires the husband’s permission, known as a “get,” and tales abound of women whose husbands refuse to consent.
While it’s common for rabbis to take action against defiant husbands, such as barring them from synagogue life, Rabbi Epstein, 68, took matters much further, according to the authorities.
For hefty fees, he orchestrated the kidnapping and torture of reluctant husbands, charging their wives as much as $10,000 for a rabbinical decree permitting violence and $50,000 to hire others to carry out the deed, according to federal charges unsealed on Thursday morning.
Rabbi Epstein, along with another rabbi, Martin Wolmark, who is the head of a yeshiva, as well as several men in what the authorities called the “kidnap team,” appeared in Federal District Court in Trenton after a sting operation in which an undercover federal agent posed as an Orthodox Jewish woman soliciting Rabbi Epstein’s services.
………
When two undercover F.B.I. agents — one posing as a woman seeking a divorce, the other as her brother — asked a rabbi for help, the rabbi explained how Rabbi Epstein might be able to assist them.
“You need special rabbis who are going to take this thing and see it through to the end,” Rabbi Martin Wolmark, a respected figure who presides over a yeshiva in Monsey, N.Y., said in a recorded telephone call on Aug. 7. He described Rabbi Epstein as “a hired hand” who could help, according to the criminal complaint in the case.
When the undercover agents met with Rabbi Epstein a week later, he said that he was confident he could secure a get once his “tough guys” had made their threats.
(emphasis mine)
Women who are trapped by this are called Agunot, (literally “Chained Women”) and their plight is heart-breaking, but these guys are not trying to help, they are drying to make bank of these women’s pain.
Some of the alleged kidnappers come from My wife’s old neighborhood.
She spent much of her time growing up in Rockland county, just over the line from Monsey.
Who knew that she was in an area that was mobbed up?
*It’s hard to be a Jew. This is so embarrassing.
Mark Zuckerberg is Making Larry Ellison Look Like a Mindful Human Being
Because only a few percent of users are availing themselves of the feature, Facebook has dropped a feature that allowed users to exempt themselves from search, because, I guess, they need to sell ads to stalkers:
Facebook is getting rid of a privacy feature that let users limit who can find them on the social network.
Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it is removing a setting that controls whether users could be found when people type their name into the website’s search bar.
Yes, I do Facebook, because, there is no viable alternative.
Google Plus? Surely you jest?
Linkage
- ScareMail plugin will flag all your email to the NSA (The Guardian) Basically, it fills your email with NSA bait in the same way that aluminum foil in chaff with false radar returns.
- Irish Doctors Strike to Protest Work Hours Amid Austerity (Portside.org) So much for the Irish being a Euro Zone success story.
- The Kochs Can’t Control the Monster They Created (The Atlantic) Schadenfreude time.
- T-Mobile stops trying to rape their customers (New York Times). It was such a good thing when the T-Mobile/AT&T merger was killed by regulators. When my contract ends, they will get a serious look.
- Fact: the NSA gets negligible intel from Americans’ metadata. So end collection. (The Guardian) Very good point.
- NSA director admits to misleading public on terror plots (Salon) So nu?
Hail his noodley goodness.
Man who claims his religion forces him to wear a sieve on his head given permission to wear one on his official identity card picture (Daily Mail) Pastafarians, yeah.
Today’s Moment of Hedonism
Last week, I was rear ended on the Outer Loop, while I was stopped in traffic.
There were some minor dings on my rear bumper, and no injuries of anyone.
What it did mean was that her insurance would pay for my repairs, so it went into the shop yesterday, and they are also paying for a rental car.
It is a 2013 VW Jetta Wagon, a gas version, and it is loaded.
This morning, it was chilly, our first real brush with Autumnal weather, and so I tried out the electric seat warmers.
I really like the electric bun warmers.
I decided to call Sharon* out when I got home, and had her check out the heated seats.
She really like the electric bun warmers as well.
Not as nice as the Dalek robotic Brookstone massage chairs that I’ve tried out in the mall, but nice all the same.
Sweet car, though I would go with the 4 cylinder turbo-diesel, rather than the 5 cylinder gas engine version, and I might go with a manual transmission if I were in the market as well.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Least Surprising News of the Day
Obama’s war on whistle-blowers and the press has been examined by former WaPo editor-in-chief Leonard Downie, Jr., and is described in his report as, “The most aggressive since Nixon.”
The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.
The former counsel for the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case is far less circumspect about this:
Since 2009, the Obama administration has prosecuted more people as whistleblowers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all former presidents combined, a fact often rehashed in journalistic circles. In some of those cases, officials seized journalists’ phone and email records to use in their investigation. James Goodale, who was The New York Times’ chief counsel during Pentagon Papers coverage, has told CJR that Obama’s aggressive crackdown on whistleblowers is “antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon. He thinks that anyone who leaks is a spy! I mean, it’s cuckoo.”
There is a pathology in the White House about leaks, and considering the vehemence, it has to come from the top, and it has to be deeply felt.
Ironically, this attitude is probably causing more harm than good for the Obama administration, though I would argue that the damage to the idea freedom of the press as a counterweight to government excess is far greater.
This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.
This Says More About the University of Chicago Than They Would Like
I’ve always wondered if the University of Chicago economics department was little more than than an attempt to engage in, “One of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness,” to quote John Kenneth Galbrath.
Now it appears that the whole damn school is exclusively structured for the purpose reinforcing privilege:
Back in May at the University of Chicago, this happened:
Two locksmiths with medical conditions were told to repair locks on the fourth floor of the Administration Building during the day. Stephen Clarke, the locksmith who originally responded to the emergency repair, has had two hip replacement surgeries during his 23 years as an employee of the University. According to Clarke, when he asked Kevin Ahn, his immediate supervisor, if he could use the elevator due to his medical condition, Ahn said no. Clarke was unable to perform the work, and Elliot Lounsbury, a second locksmith who has asthma, was called to perform the repairs. Lounsbury also asked Ahn if he could use the elevator to access the fourth floor, was denied, and ended up climbing the stairs to the fourth floor.
Clarke and Lounsbury were told they had to haul their asthma and hip replacements up four flights of stairs because the University of Chicago has had a policy of forbidding workers from using the elevators in this building, which houses the President’s office, during daytime hours. As the university’s director of labor relations put it: “The University has requested that maintenance and repair workers should normally use the public stairway in the Administration Building rather than the two public elevators.”
The problem is not just that the divide between rich and poor is too extreme, it is that we are going balls to the wall feudal as well.