Making the case once again. I’ve been saying that for years, before he was president.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Goldwater’s Disastrous Prophecy
…has come true.
Hooverville Blues
John Podhoretz isn’t impressed with Clint Eastwood’s latest movie:
If you make the mistake of going to see J. Edgar, you will emerge much older by the time the movie finishes, even though only two hours will have passed. Forget all that questionable talk about how those newly tested subatomic particles move so quickly that they violate the rules of time and can order a drink before they walk into the bar. It is Clint Eastwood, Hollywood’s only functioning octogenarian director, and not a subatomic particle, who has figured out a way to breach Einstein’s relativity theory. In the theaters in which his movies play, time literally slows down to the speed of an ant. I was so ancient by the time J. Edgar was done that I went home and watched five reruns of Law and Order.
There’s more, including a John Voight reference.
The Avastin Decision
Did the FDA do the right thing?
The Wall Street Journal, and others, have denounced the FDA’s move as “a chillingly blunt assertion of regulatory power.” But my Manhattan Institute colleague Paul Howard is the guy who gets it right, in a blog post for Medical Progress Today:
If you think (as I do) that the FDA should be expanding the accelerated approval pathway and allow more drugs to get to market based on promising early studies. rather than waiting for large Phase III clinical trials that can take years to complete, you can argue that this outcome actually strengthens AA. Critics have charged that AA is sop to industry, and that companies never do the follow up studies to support AA. Avastin proves them wrong.
This is exactly the point. If you want the FDA to approve more innovative, new drugs based on promising but early clinical results, you have to give the FDA a way to revoke those approvals later on, should larger trials prove that those drugs aren’t as safe or effective as they first seemed. This is why the FDA should be congratulated for the way it has handled the Avastin breast cancer saga, and why I hope we will see the FDA handle more cases like this one, not less.
Yes, this is better than the way they’ve done it in the past, but this argument presumes that the FDA should have such regulatory power in the first place. It’s one thing to provide data on efficacy. It’s another to prevent people from making their own decisions about what drugs to use for which ailments.
Question For Space News Subscribers
Does anyone know if they ran my letter to the editor last week?
Obama’s Coming Nightmare Decision
Whether or not to bail out the Eurozone.
There’s never a good time to get in to a job that’s way over your head, but he picked a particularly bad one.
Penn State In Michigan?
Well, this is interesting, I guess, but as commenters note, usually there’s not just one witness in cases like this. Hard to know what’s cause and what’s effect in terms of the guy’s mental condition (that is, is he mentally ill because of real abuse, or is he making up stories about abuse because he’s mentally ill?). Though apparently the mother was aware, and they did have contact.
For whatever it’s worth, when I was growing up, I lived around the corner from Congressman Kildee, and delivered his morning paper. When I collected from him, he never invited me in.
[Update a while later]
Given that he’s retiring this year, I wonder what effect, if any, these revelations will have on the race to replace him? Might make it tougher for nephew Dan.
[Late evening update]
Welcome, Instapundit readers. I have to say that it’s certainly possible that he just wasn’t that into me. Certainly true of a lot of women that I’ve met over the decades…
What Occupy Harvard
…should tell their elite liberal parents on Thanksgiving:
The man you think is a “sucker” because he votes for Republican candidates who don’t seem to give a hoot about him will vote for them every time. He looks at you, the crowd of The-Fix-Is-Always-In, and he casts his lot with the crowd of wealth and initiative.
You see, Mom and Dad, they don’t lie about his prospects. They tell him that he has to sink or swim. They don’t disrespect his willpower by promising that government will make life easier for him. They tell him that they respect his individuality. They tell him straight out what you, the liberal elite, know to be true but will never say. They tell him that life in America is winner-take-all, and that they are the people who will let him keep what he has. They tell him that his religion, his wife’s capacity to reproduce, his children—whether they are “successful” or not—are his treasure. They tell him that they don’t care if he is a person of modest ambition, little sophistication, and humble means. What they value is his capacity to change his own life.
What you tell him is that he should put his life in your hands. Yet you scorn his religion. You mock his faith in the sacredness of conception. You deride his belief in family. You tell him that his love for hunting makes him a murderer, and that his terror at being economically displaced makes him a xenophobe and a racist. Then you emasculate his hope for the future by telling him that if his ship comes in—that dream of a ship that makes the grinding disappointment of daily life worth living through—you’ll help yourself to a big slice of it. And you expect him to believe your rhetoric about fairness and equality when, all the while, you are accusing him of gullibility in his politics and bad faith toward the least fortunate of his fellow citizens. When, all the while, you are living untouched by your own policies. When you are cushioned against life’s hardness, not by government, but by simply knowing other people in your class. You expect him to buy your talk about equitable distribution of wealth when you are sailing through tax loopholes off into the sunset. For this man, his emotions make all the rational sense in the world.
Indeed.
Is The AP Panicking?
Now they’re trying to pretend that the Democrats weren’t totally on board with the Occupoopers.
[Update mid morning]
Obama’s coming Occupy nightmare.
Good News For Space Startups
And not just space startups: the House passed a bill to allow non-accredited investors to invest up to ten grand in startups. This would undo some of the damage caused by Sarbanes-Oxley, though that still needs to be repealed as well (one of the many disasters of the Bush administration). It would also be a huge improvement over decades-long SEC rules that have prevented space entrepreneurs from easily raising funds. And yes, of course, there will be some bad deals. Caveat emptor.
And of course, it isn’t law yet. It still has to get through the Senate and signed by the president. I won’t hold my breath.