…criticize subsidy-suckler lobbying. I don’t think that Newt is helping himself here.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
If Assad Falls
…Hezbollah will take Beirut. Goody.
Rebel Romney
The Affirmative Action President
Making the case once again. I’ve been saying that for years, before he was president.
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…