The American Spectator

The Road Ahead in the Health Care Battle

Posted by Philip Klein on 11.21.09 @ 4:19PM

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has secured the needed 60 votes to bring his health care bill to the Senate floor after Thanksgiving recess, there's still a long road to go until President Obama can sign legislation into law.

The optimistic take for Democrats today is obviously that health care legislation has cleared another hurdle. And it must be said that however many ups and downs there have been throughout the process, at each stage Democrats have found a way to move the ball down field. They managed to get bills out of committees, cobble together enough votes to get the bill passed in the House, and today, to get the bill to the Senate floor. Comprehensive health care legislation has never come this close to passing at any time in American history. Thus, there's good reason to believe that somehow the Democratic leadership, along with the White House, will be able to iron out their remaining differences, twist enough arms, and dole out enough goodies to get past the goal line.

With that said, there are plenty of ways for everything to completely fall apart for Democrats in the coming weeks and months. Though Reid was able to unite his caucus for tonight's vote, at least two Senators -- Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln -- have unequivocally said that they would block any bill that still included a government plan at the end of the upcoming amendment process. Sen. Mary Landrieu said that Reid wouldn't have 60 votes unless Democrats agree to weaken the government plan so that it is triggered if private insurers don't reach certain benchmarks. Sen. Ben Nelson has said he wants more restrictive abortion language in the bill. That doesn't include other Democratic Senators whose votes could be in doubt depending on how the amendment process goes. It's worth keeping in mind that once the bill reaches the floor, Reid will need 60 votes to make any changes. It's really difficult to see how there could be 60 votes in the Senate to go as far as the House did to ensure that no taxpayer money covers abortions. And it's also questionable whether there are 60 votes to remove (or at least weaken) the government plan.

Even if Reid figures out a way to get his caucus to fall into line and squeaks the bill through the Senate, the Senate bill would still have to be reconciled with the House version. And anything that gets negotiated in that conference (on abortion language, the government plan, etc.) could upset the delicate balance that enabled Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass the House bill by a narrow 220 to 215 vote margin.

Another thing to keep in mind is that with the bill first going to the Senate floor on November 30, this process is now all but assured to drag into next year. And there's a reason why the White House had been emphasizing the need to get health care done by the end of the year. The longer this drags on, the more pressure there will be on Democrats to do something about the unemployment crisis, the more President Obama's popularity can decline, the more chance there is that unforseen circumstances can get in the way, and the closer they get to the 2010 elections.

So, on one hand, Democrats scored a big victory today, but on the other hand, if it was this difficult to keep their caucus together on a vote to bring the bill to the floor, it may not bode well for the much tougher votes ahead.

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In Sum, IPCC Discredited

Posted by Paul Chesser on 11.21.09 @ 3:27PM

My colleagues at the Heartland Institute have posted their succinct summary of the implications from Climategate, and it is very simple: The UN IPCC gatekeepers have lost all credibility, and consequently their disciples no longer have it as an authority.

Emails exchanged by Phil Jones (director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit) and other leading scientists who edit and control the content of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveal a conspiracy to falsify the actual temperature record and silence so-called "skeptics." Anyone who continues to cite the IPCC as representing the "consensus" on global warming is wrong. The IPCC has been totally discredited.

And for good measure, Heartland has already consigned this event to their history archive, setting it in further context.

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topics: Global Warming, Environmentalism, Climate Change

Blanche Lincoln Gives Reid Needed Votes to Advance Bill

Posted by Philip Klein on 11.21.09 @ 2:41PM

Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said she would vote to allow the Senate health care bill to advance, thus giving Majority Leader Harry Reid the needed votes to bring the legislation to the floor for debate after Thanksgiving recess.

Lincoln also put fellow Democrats on notice that she would vote against moving the bill in the next major vote if the government-run plan is not removed by the end of the amendment process.

“Although I don’t agree with everything in this bill, I have concluded that I believe it is more important that we begin this debate to improve our nation’s health care system for all Americans, rather than just simply drop the issue and walk away,” Lincoln said.

She said that, “Attempts by the national Republican Party and other conservative groups to portray this as a vote for or against this particular health care reform bill, is untrue.”

Several times, she said she said it was “not my last or only chance to have an impact” and promised to be unswayed by pressure from political groups on the left or right.

“My first loyalties are to the people of Arkansas,” Lincoln insisted. But a Zogby poll released earlier this week found that Arkansans opposed health care legislation by a 64 percent to 29 percent margin, and after pollsters explained what was in the legislation, that number grew to 68 percent to 26 percent. It also showed that her reelection chances would be severely hampered in 2010 if she voted for the bill.

“I’m not thinking about my reelection, the legacy of a president, or whether Democrats or Republicans are going to be able to claim victory in winning this debate,” she said in announcing her support to advance the bill to the Senate floor.

But while securing a short-term victory for Reid, Lincoln also complicated things by vowing unequivocally to block any bill that included a government-run plan from getting a final vote.

“Let me be perfectly clear,” she said. “I am opposed to a new government administered health care plan as a part of comprehensive health insurance reform, and I will not vote in favor of the proposal that has been introduced by leader Reid as it is written.”

More specifically, she warned, “I am also aware that there will be additional procedural votes to move this process forward that will require 60 votes prior to the conclusion to the floor debate. I’ve already alerted the leader and I’m promising my colleagues that I’m prepared to vote against moving to the next stage of consideration as long as a government-run option is included.”

Earlier in her speech, Lincoln explained her reasons for opposing the government plan.

“I believe that we should work to make sure that we do not expose American taxpayers and the Treasury to a long-term risk that could occur over future government bailouts,” she said.

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Landrieu Says She’ll Vote to Advance Health Care Bill

Posted by Philip Klein on 11.21.09 @ 12:51PM

And then there was one.

Sen. Mary Landrieu just announced she would vote to allow Harry Reid’s health care bill to make it to the Senate floor for a vote.

Landrieu, who was one of just two remaining Democratic holdouts, secured $100 million in special Medicaid funding for Louisiana as part of the bill. She cautioned that, "The vote today to move forward in this important debate should in no way be construed by supporters of this current framework as an indication of how I might vote as this debate comes to an end."

But her decision does make it much more likely that the legislation will ultimately pass, and leaves Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas as the only Democrat who has yet to declare her intentions. Reid needs Lincoln in order to reach the necessary 60-vote threshold.

UPDATE: Landrieu addressed the million payment to Louisiana in her remarks, blasting "very partisan Republican bloggers" for spreading the story. However, the news, as far as I can tell, was first reported by the Politico and ABC News. The argument she made was that post-Katrina federal aid to Louisiana made the state appear artificially richer, and thus deprived them of the federal Medicaid funding they deserve. And she boasted that the actual amount was $300 million.

In her remarks, Landrieu also suggested many improvements, and praised Sen. Ron Wyden proposal to open up the exchanges to those who may not be satisfied with their employer-based care.

She also continued to express reservations about the government plan, arguing that it would pose "significant risk to taxpayers over time.” Instead, she supports a proposal by Sen. Olympia Snowe to "trigger" the government plan if the private market doesn't meet certain government benchmarks.

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That Dangerous Radical . . . Marvin Olasky?

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 11.21.09 @ 12:39PM

The late Francis Schaeffer was one of the most celebrated evangelical Christian writers of the late 20th century, the author of several influential books, including How Should We Then Live? Though less well-known than such figures as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Schaeffer nonetheless played an important role in the rise of what is usually called the Religious Right.

Schaeffer's son, Frank, has in recent years begun to trade on his late father's legacy, asserting that Christian conservatives and the Republican Party have been bamboozled and hijacked by extremist charlatans. Chief among the charlatans, according to Frank Schaeffer, is Sarah Palin, whom he savages with a guilt-by-association attack involving Lynn Vincent, my longtime friend and co-author of Donkey Cons, who also happened to be Sarah Palin's collaborator on Going Rogue.

Among the telltale idiocies of Frank's attack is the way in which he cites a paragraph from Chapter 6 of Donkey Cons regarding Whittaker Chambers' revelations about Alger Hiss. This shows that (a) Schaeffer is getting his talking points from Media Matters, and (b) Schaeffer doesn't have any real comprehension of Chambers' significance in the history of American conservatism. Chambers' landmark memoir Witness was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite books, and Chambers interpreted his own experience through a religious lens. And it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Chambers' exposure of Hiss was a turning point in world history. (Just in case anyone is curious -- I feel like Paul McCartney discussing his songwriting partnership with John Lennon -- Chapter 6 was largely Lynn's work.)

In his desperate desire to smear Palin, Schaeffer doubles down on idiocy by making Lynn the linkage for a second-degree guilt-by-association attack. Some such attacks -- including a misinformed outburst by Rachel Maddow a few weeks ago on NBC's "Meet the Press" -- have tried to use me as a stick with which to beat Palin, for having worked with Lynn, a "known associate" of such a terrible person as myself.

Schaeffer, however, chooses to focus his own guilt-by-association Palin smear on Marvin Olasky, who as  editor-in-chief of World magazine was for many years Lynn Vincent's boss. (Readers are invited to smile with me at the irony of this. Would you wish to be held accountable for everything your boss ever said or did? And did I happen to mention that I spent 10 years working for The Washington Times, whose founder is the Rev. Sun Yung Moon?)

Schaeffer endeavors to convince readers that Olasky is a dangerous "far right" extremist, "who has been working to more or less turn America into a theocracy ever since the late 1980s and early 1990s," and whose work "was largely funded by far right banker" Howard Ahmanson. Generally speaking, I distrust any writer who, as Schaeffer does, insists on shoehorning three "far rights" into a single paragraph. Schaeffer earns compound interest on my distrust when, in support of his claim that Olasky is an advocate of "Bible-inspired totalitarianism/theocratic neofascism" (!) he cites Max Blumenthal, son of our old Clintonista acquaintance Sidney Blumenthal.

Most remarkably, Schaeffer does all this while posturing as a friend to Republicans and conservatives and -- further exposing himself as irony-impaired -- invoking another historic figure:

The chief characteristic of Palin's book is her trashing of the old cautious and respectable William F. Buckley-style Republican Party . . .

Buckley was among other things a close associate of that notorious extremist, Whittaker Chambers, but anyone familiar with Buckley's career knows that for many years the founder of National Review was regarded as anything but "cautious and respectable." Buckley's seminal book God and Man at Yale, was famously denounced as "having the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night" (Saturday Review) and its author's methods described as "precisely those employed in Italy, Germany, and Russia" (New Republic).

By dint of his long and successful career, Buckley eventually obtained a stature that might be deemed "cautious and respectable," but to invoke Buckley's name as a means of denouncing an eminent conservative intellectual like Olasky as a "neofascist" is the act of a fool, which Frank Schaeffer most certainly is.

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Elsewhere in the Enviro-Activist Mediasphere

Posted by Paul Chesser on 11.21.09 @ 12:13PM

No need for me to leave out the other two media objects of my occasional denunciation in the Climategate story. George Soros's organizational daughter-in-law, Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin, apparently was instructed by her editor to come up with copy superficially sufficient to fill a 472-word space on page A14. Of course she obliged, tapping out a crime story while barely addressing the substance of what was discovered. She even read the statement from the Climate Research Unit confirming authenticity of the records, made at least four phone calls, and included the sexy part about the alarmists wanting to beat up Pat Michaels (Look at that face -- you wanna mess with him?!)!

Not bad, I guess, for a getaway Friday -- but points deducted, Juliet, for accepting at face value the CRU/alarmist assumption that it was a hack job. Very well could have been an insider with a conscience.

As for my other target, I decided to visit the Web site of the Society of Environmental Journalists to see what, if any, buzz might be going on there (despite it being a usually quiet Saturday). It was quiet, but they do have a news aggregator with continual feeds from other news organizations. I found the following headlines among the most recent (which include Saturday stories):

• Hidden threat: Elevated pollution levels near regional airports
• Today's Arctic Circle Comic Strip
• Michigan recycling rates drop
• Children starve in parched southern Madagascar
• As nuclear reactor fleet ages, engineers ask,' is 80 the new 40?'
• Tree-eating bugs threaten Monarch butterfly in Mexico

No sign of climate research units, emails, scientist tricks, hackers, or East Anglia. Maybe Monday!

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topics: Mainstream Media, Global Warming, Environmentalism, Climate Change

Forget the Committees

Posted by Greg Scandlen on 11.21.09 @ 11:33AM

Women all over America were thrown for a loop this week when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force dropped its endorsement of regular mammograms for women aged 40 and above. But it went even further and recommended against teaching women how to screen themselves for lumps in their breasts.

Yikes! For decades we have all been told that screening was essential in the war against breast cancer. “Early detection saves lives” was the mantra. There have been public service ads on TV. Forty-nine states have mandated coverage of screening in insurance policies. The importance of early mammograms and self-screening have been drummed into the heads of every woman everywhere.

Now they are telling us it does more harm than good. Now they say early detection results in false positives, needless biopsies, excessive exposure to radiation, and the excision of lumps that are benign.

This is only the latest in a string of reversals. Just recently the National Committee for Quality Assurance abruptly dropped its recommendations on lowering glucose in diabetics because it was discovered that in some cases following its guidelines could harm or even kill patients.

And two years ago it was found that, while hormone replacement therapy (HRT) might be effective is treating the symptoms of menopause and lowering the risk of colon cancer and dementia, it also raised the risk of breast cancer, stroke, and ovarian cancer. Suddenly all the guidelines that had been developed were thrown out the window.

In each of these cases, the fall-back recommendation of these guideline-producing committees was “consult your doctor.” Well, Duh!

The fact is your doctor is able to prescribe the therapy most appropriate for your condition, health history, risk factors, and even genetic profile.  Doctors can customize treatments to the needs of an individual patient. All a committee can do is tally up what is happening to a large number of people and average it over the whole population.

But averages are meaningless in health care – and in everything else. Iowa may suffer a drought in one year and floods the next year. Average them together and you have a nice, mild amount of rainfall. But that average tells us absolutely nothing about how corn farmers fared in either year.

Health care by committee is not a great idea in any event. But the real problem comes when these committees declare with absolute, 100 percent certainty that its guidelines are the way to go and every doctor should do exactly what the guidelines say – until it changes its mind. Then it will declare with absolute, 100 percent certainty that the new guidelines are the only way to go.

Now today the Preventive Services Task Force is saying DO NOT get an annual mammogram. But the American Cancer Society is still saying you SHOULD get an annual mammogram. Each side accuses the other of being influenced by business interests. On one side the insurance companies don’t want to pay for mammograms, but on the other side the companies that make the machines and supply the x-ray film want to sell more stuff.  Who should you believe?

And this is the biggest problem with most of the health reform ideas coming out of Washington. The politicians are all influenced by lobbyists on one side or the other. And none of them care a whit about you, the patient.

Forget the committees and the politicians. Listen to the one person who knows you bet -- your personal doctor.

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Reid Disses David Broder

Posted by Philip Klein on 11.21.09 @ 10:20AM

In his opening floor remarks Saturday morning, Sen. Mitch McConnell cited this David Broder column from the Washington Post on Obamacare, headlined, "A budget buster in the making."

Reid responded with the familiar criticism that McConnell has no business talking about fiscal responsibility when McConnell supported President Bush's reckless spending on Iraq. Then Reid scoffed at Broder, who he dismissed as "a man who has been retired for many years, and writes a column once and awhile."

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What to Expect in the Senate Today

Posted by Philip Klein on 11.21.09 @ 10:08AM

The Senate has just open for business this Saturday morning to consider the motion to proceed that would require 60 votes to pass, and thus allow the 2,074-page health care bill to get to the floor. There will be 10 hours of debate, followed by a vote at 8 p.m. So far, we don't know what the outcome will be, becuase Democratic Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu have not announced their intentions.

Here's the debating schedule that Harry Reid announced this morning:

10 am-6pm: Each party controling alternating hours, with Democrats controlling the first hour.

6-6:30 p.m. Democrats' time.

6:30-7:15 p.m. Republicans' time.

7:15-7:30 p.m. Democrats' time.

7:30-8 p.m. Time controlled by leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell.

8 p.m. Roll call vote on the motion to proceed.

The proceedings are being broadcast on CSPAN-2. I'll be updating this blog with breaking news or other items I find interesting and amusing. If you want more blow-by-blow reaction, you can follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/philipaklein .

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McCain is Not Scozzafava, and Palin Won't Be Branded a "Sell-Out"

Posted by Philip Klein on 11.21.09 @ 9:40AM

Daniel Larison, in response to Bill Kristol's suggestion that Palin campaign for McCain in the Arizona Senate primary, writes:

Were she to side openly with McCain in a primary against Hayworth, whose views match up a lot more closely with her supporters’ views, she would be seen as imitating McCain’s worst habits. She would be considered a worse sell-out than McCain. She would be doing exactly the opposite of what she did in NY-23. Her intervention may have failed to elect Hoffman, but rank-and-file conservatives generally loved her for it anyway. She would fritter all that away if she backed McCain. In exchange for the contempt and disaffection of the people who currently adore her, she would win the enduring affection of editors at The Weekly Standard. McCain seems to be satisfied with this, but I doubt it would be enough for Palin.

There is not much nuance to Larison's thinking here. It's completely absurd to compare the NY-23 Congressional race to the Arizona Senate primary, because beyond the broad outlines -- a race between an establishment candidate and a conservative insurgent -- there are few similarities. Scozzafava was not a moderate, she was a liberal who ultimately endorsed the Democrat anyway. It was not a matter of one issue -- she held liberal views on abortion, pledged to vote for "card check," and called the cops on a reporter who asked whether she would vote for a health care bill that raised taxes. McCain is pro-life. He has been firmly against "card check" to the point where he has actually blocked the nomination of Craig Becker to serve on the National Labor Relations Board (Becker is an SEIU lawyer who has written that "card check" could be implemented by the NLRB without Congressional action). He voted against the economic stimulus bill. And he has been adamantly against the health care bill. There's also the distinction between losing a single House seat and losing a Senate seat that could mean the difference between giving Obama a rubber stamp in the Senate or perhaps gaining a few seats next year to be able to effectively block anything major that Obama proposes. And while it was realistic to think that Hoffman could have a chance of winning, there's less reason to believe that J.D. Hayworth -- who couldn't win a Congressional race -- could win statewide. Now, I've had my share of issues with McCain over the years and am not going to argue that he's a perfect conservative. And for those who see immigration as such a crucial issue to them that they have to support Hayworth as a matter of conscience, I'm not going to tell them not to. But for Larison to sugeest that for Palin to keep in the good graces of her base, she has to back the more conservative candidate in every single race, no matter what other circumstances are in play, is totally ludicrous.

If there's one thing I've learned about Palin supporters -- especially when I've criticized her -- it's that they are generally very forgiving of her and willing to cut her a lot of slack. Ever since she burst onto the scene, I've been trying, to no avail, to argue that we shouldn't compare her to Ronald Reagan when he spent decades studying conservative philosophy and defending it and served two terms as governor of California, and she has a very slim governing record and it's unclear whether she's really a committed small government conservative. Even though I avoid the personal vitriol that has consumed much of the anti-Palin commentary and try to raise what I see as fair questions about her qualifications to be president, her acceptance of pork spending, her initial support for the "Bridge to Nowhere," etc., I'm brandished an elitist RINO who should shut up and go back to my brie and chablis. This is a long way of saying that it would take a lot more than backing McCain over Hayworth for Palin's supporters to view her as a "sell-out."

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Presto! Alarmist Emails Not Such a Big Deal

Posted by Paul Chesser on 11.21.09 @ 8:44AM

That's The Amazing Revkin for you -- the New York Times' DotEarth blogger/environmental reporter attempts some M*A*S*H-style meatball surgery this morning on the badly hemorrhaging climate alarmoscientists' scandal that has erupted in East Anglia, UK. First he acknowledges that some of the most prominent climate fictionalizers in the world said some very naughty things about global warming skeptics, but then he promptly cues the violins:

Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

And then Revkin asserts that it's all pretty meaningless in the overall scheme:

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.

Revkin has authored two global warming books and so has a lot to lose himself from this controversy, as his reputation is just as much at stake as the scientists.' Therefore his defense mechanisms are fully engaged. In his blog post yesterday about the revelations, he states that repercussions "continue to unfold" and "there’s much more to explore," but do you really think he can be counted on for follow-up stories about it this week? We'll see, but this attitude doesn't give much hope:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here. But a quick sift of skeptics’ Web sites will point anyone to plenty of sources.

And what a surprise: He offers no links to those skeptics' sites. Meanwhile, blogger Tom Nelson notes Revkin's past freedom-of-information heroics when it came to scrutinizing the Bush administration. So while Revkin and alarmists engage in crybabyism, the climate realists among us train our eyes on the substantive. For example, Czech physicist Lubos Motl identified a few juicy morsels from the emails, including one in which the University of East Anglia CRU's Phil Jones writes to U.S. atmospheric scientist (and realist) John Christy:

...If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish. Cheers, Phil

Indeed, selfishness appears to be at the heart of much of the alarmism movement. Motl discovers money transfer methods and tax evasion schemes, as well as Jones's well-funded endeavors over the years:

So far, the most interesting file I found...shows that since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants.

There is oh-so-much. Like I said yesterday, it's like watching the ACORN-sting videos over and over again because you just can't believe what you're seeing.

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topics: Global Warming, Environmentalism, Climate Change

The Threat to Medical Innovation

Posted by Philip Klein on 11.20.09 @ 5:55PM

Earlier today, I attended a panel discussion at the Cato Institute about one of the most important aspects of health care that has gotten very little coverage during the current debate -- medical innovation.

Raymond Raad, a resident in psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and co-author of a new Cato study, presented evidence showing that the United States leads the world in the development of drugs, medical devices, and other advanced treatments. For instance, between 1969 and 2008, 57 of the 97 Nobel Prizes in medicine and physiology -- or nearly 60 percent -- were awarded to people who did their research in the U.S., and nine of the top 10 medical innovations between 1975 and 2000 were developed here. But these achievements aren't reflected in rankings of different health care systems that typically show the U.S. faring poorly and provide fodder to those pushing for government-run health care. This even though once these products are developed in the U.S., they become widely available and improve health care outcomes around the world.

Raad argued that one of the big dangers of health care legislation is that expanding the role of government and trying to impose price controls could change incentives to innovate. When the government is such a large consumer of health care, it has tremendous influence over whether some innovations succeed. As an example, Raad noted how government stunted the growth of specialty hospitals by not allowing Medicare money to spent at them. Specialty hospitals are smaller institutions formed by doctors to focus on one type of illness, such as heart disease. They can deliver better health outcomes and a more personalized experience for patients than giant factory hospitals that benefit from their tax-exempt non-profit status even as they rake in billions of dollars. Raad explained that some of the most common and important medical innovations --such as CT scans -- were quite controversial when first introduced, and thus putting more constraints on the market could prevent wider use of new products that may ultimately prove beneficial.

Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, described himself as the liberal on the panel. He emphasized the importance of universal access to new medical innovations, and argued that it was "naive" to talk about where innovations originated, since they all tend to be developed on a multi-national basis in many stages. He also showed that the pace of medical innovation has slowed in recent years, in both the U.S. and Europe, and said that it's important to do something to change incentives that are currently in place. Currently, large drug companies spend just 12 percent to 15 percent of their outlays on researching and developing new drugs, and 30 percent on marketing them. 

John Calfee of the American Enterprise Institute suggested several reasons to worry about in the current health care bills. He said they would increase the costs to both the public and private sector well beyond what Congressional Budget Office is projecting. And he warned that it would be difficult for government to resist the temptation to impose price controls on products that were very expensive relative to their marginal costs. For instance, once drugs are developed, the cost to manufacture each additional pill is small relative to the price charged for the drug. But imposing such controls would reduce profits and thus the incentives of drug companies.

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Get That Hacker a Pimp Coat

Posted by Paul Chesser on 11.20.09 @ 5:29PM

What made the ACORN-exposing work of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles so sensational was that they successfully infiltrated the habitats of the subjects they investigated, and observed their routine behaviors. They didn't have to coerce or pressure the ACORN office workers to say or do things they did not want to do. It wasn't "60 Minutes," but it reflected the new paradigm under cable TV news and Web rules. James and Hannah were like computer hackers walking in the front door and literally being given what they wanted.

So now an actual hacker -- or an insider -- has exposed something similar in the global warming activism realm: scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (regarded as Britain's top authority) caught in behaviors they would never want the outside world to see. Marc Morano at Climate Depot is developing the link archive and Australian reporter Andrew Bolt is harvesting revelatory remarks from emails and documents, as he explains:

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

The clogosphere (climate blogs) is awash in this story (again, see Climate Depot). Even if this isn't your issue, you ought to at least spend a little time this weekend (all us politico-infojunkies still get our fixes on Saturdays, right?) perusing what Bolt has unearthed. Amazing stuff which Chris Horner says could be alarmism's "blue dress moment." As Bolt notes, it's not just the East Anglians -- it's the foremost global warmer scientists from all over, caught. Wow.

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topics: Global Warming, Environmentalism, Climate Change

Justice Dep't Recusal List!

Posted by Quin Hillyer on 11.20.09 @ 3:03PM

To give credit where it is due, Byron York had a good piece on a brewing battle between Sen. Chuck Grassley and AG Eric Holder about how many times Justice officials have been forced to recuse themselves on suspected-terrorist detainee cases. Well, just within the past hour, we at the Wash Times advanced the story in a special early editorial. The answer for one official, departmental number 3 Tom Perelli: 39 times. This is a Wash Times opinion department exclusive.

The names of the detainees? Saad Al Qahtani. Mohammed Zahrani. Achraf Salim ("Sultan") Abdessalam. Abdul Rahman Abdul Abu Ghityh Sulayman. ......

Again, here's the link. Interesting stuff. Please read.

And it comes on the heels of my colleague Kerry Picket's great report yesterday that makes Chuck Schumer look a bit two-faced, about whether or not foreign terrorists captured abroad should be tried in criminal courts here.

All in all, this whole KSM trial continues to look worse and worse every day and every hour.

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Mac is Back on the Right as 2010 Approaches

Posted by Brian O'Connell on 11.20.09 @ 3:03PM

Politico reported last night that Senator McCain is expressing disapproval towards Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman's attempt to write a bipartisan climate bill. The piece suggests a position switch, pointing out that McCain has previously introduced climate legislation to the Senate multiple times. The article raises the question over whether the recession in Arizona, which has been especially hard-hitting, is playing a role in his current stance towards a cap and trade bill.

What also could be at play is McCain's 2010 race. Rasmussen polling reported this morning that McCain is only two points ahead of  former conservative Republican Congressman J.D. Hayworth for the primary. The last thing McCain needs right now politically is to be labeled as a "job killer" or even as a "Republican in name only."

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