Later On

Not what a Federal agency is supposed to do—but with no oversight and with more and more budget cuts (to accommodate all those tax cuts while running a war) gave them little choice, I imagine. Daphne Eviatar has the story in the Washington Independent:

Since 2006, the Food and Drug Administration has ignored its own internal regulation and stopped requiring manufacturers of medical devices – such as pacemakers, heart valves and other life-sustaining inventions – to meet specific safety requirements before they are deemed safe enough to be implanted in humans.

As the Project on Government Oversight reveals in a special report today based on internal FDA document obtained by POGO,  senior officials within the FDA made this decision without public notice.  Manufacturers have been trusted to monitor themselves ever since.

The problem is particularly alarming because last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that patients harmed by these devices have no right to sue the manufacturers, if the device was approved by the FDA.

So now, the FDA is letting the manufacturers set their own safety standards, and the Supreme Court is shielding those manufacturers from lawsuits.

So who’s watching out for the hapless heart patient?

Update: Congress could step in to do that.  First, it could boost funding for the FDA and require it to enforce those laboratory safety standards the agency effectively discarded.  Second, it could pass the Medical Device Safety Act of 2008, which would nullify the Supreme Court’s decision in Riegel v. Medtronic last year and restore the rights of patients injured by medical devices to sue the companies that made them — restoring a critical incentive for manufacturers to ensure the safety of their own products.

Quincy Adams writes in the Reality-Based Community:

A chart of Fed statistics on Industrial Capacity Utilization released today shows the depth and steepness of the current fall in economic activity. It also shows graphically the dramatically sub-normal rate of growth in capacity and thus economic potential during the entire George W. Bush administration — compared to every other recent Presidency, and the distinctly superior performance of both capacity and sustained high rates of utilization during the Clinton administration.

The unprecedented steepness of the fall in activity in the last few months is especially troubling because it started from a low base–and because it’s not over yet.

See also Nate Silver’s use of census statistics to show the Clinton administration’s superior effect on the incomes of the poor and middle class as well as the rich. (Note that comparing the two charts shows that Silver’s Reagan/Bush statistics are helped by the fact that the Reagan period started at a relatively low point in the business cycle, and the George W. Bush statistics will look much worse when the 2008 numbers are included.)

Steve Benen:

George Will not only published an error-filled column on global warming, Brad Johnson notes that the conservative columnist "is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word."

With this in mind, maybe now would be a good time to consider what George Will has written about bloggers.

There are, however, essentially no reins on the Web — few means of control and direction. That is good, but it vitiates the idea that the Web’s chaos of entertainment, solipsism and occasional intellectual seriousness and civic engagement is anything like a polity (a "digital democracy").

As Jonathan Chait noted, "If by ‘no reins,’ Will means that bloggers can publish outright falsehoods without consequence, then he’s correct. But he might not be the best person to make this point."

And speaking of writers and "reins," Jonathan Schwarz passes along a great anecdote from Noam Chomsky that seems especially relevant given the events of the last few days.

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971"—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter." I said, "What’s the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it." Well, okay.

As far as I can tell, George Will’s column, which ran on Sunday, still hasn’t garnered a correction. Perhaps he’s throwing a tantrum.

Number of open positions posted each week in a tech specialty in the San Francisco Bay area:

From the Center on American Progress:

The economic recovery package that President Obama signed into law yesterday in Denver contains many important health care provisions such as funding for Medicaid and health IT as well as subsidies for the recently unemployed. However, the bill does not represent a total victory for progressive health care advocates, as lawmakers negotiating the bill compromised on a number of key health care components. For example, negotiators bowed to objections from conservatives and stripped provisions that would have allowed workers "to stay on Cobra until they qualified for Medicare" or enroll in Medicaid if they couldn’t afford COBRA premiums "even with the new subsidies." At the same time, Americans in large numbers are losing health care coverage. In fact, according to a new Center for American Progress Action Fund report, the unemployment rate grew by 0.8 percentage points in December and January while 100,000 people a week, or 14,000 people a day lost their health coverage. The ranks of the uninsured will continue to grow as the recession persists. As Berkeley professor Jacob Hacker pointed out, the stimulus "won’t provide the cure" to the health care crisis. "What we need is a new New Deal."

From the Center on American Progress:

After signing the $787 billion economic recovery bill into law yesterday, President Obama will announce a plan to address the nation’s housing crisis today in Phoenix, AZ. The much needed plan will reportedly "use at least $50 billion in Wall Street rescue money authorized last year to provide subsidies when banks reduce interest rates for troubled homeowners to lower the monthly payments many Americans are now struggling to pay." However, it appears that conservatives in Congress are gearing up to obstruct the plan. In fact, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) was already preparing to stage a partisan fight against Obama’s housing legislation before the details were even released. "When you’re looking at the policy here, you’ve got to start with the fact that 93 percent of America’s families are current on their mortgages and, frankly, are out there wondering, you know, who is going to pay for this continued succession of bailouts?" Cantor said in an interview with CBS on Monday. "We just cannot continue to pay for the kind of things that this administration thinks we can." Cantor’s blind opposition is ironic, considering that several conservatives in Congress — including Cantor himself — slammed the economic recovery package for allegedly not addressing the housing crisis. Indeed, in an op-ed last month titled "Fix the Stimulus," Cantor argued, "Also critical will be addressing the housing crisis."

From the Center on American Progress:

Yesterday, the Obama administration launched Recovery.gov, a website that will attempt to institute accountability over the expenditure of stimulus funds. "The site features cool graphs, interactive maps, projected timelines of when the money will start pumping into the economy, and a place to share your stories and offer comments."

Newsweek did a study recently, which found that the more prominent a pundit, the less accurate are the pundit’s predictions. George Will provides a case in point. We’ve already seen Paul Krugman demolish Will’s uninformed ideas about how the US recovered from the Great Depression (Krugman is an economist, Will a pundit of no special knowledge). And now, in an email from the Center for American Progress:

In Sunday’s Washington Post, conservative columnist George Will attacked Secretary of Energy (and Nobel-Prize winning physicist) Steven Chu for describing that, "in a worst case," "global warming might melt 90 percent of California’s snowpack." Chu was referring to "the persistent and dramatic decline in the snowpack of many mountains in the West," a phenomenon scientists attribute to "human-induced global warming." In fact, in response to the statewide drought, "the nation’s biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades." Without refuting Chu’s claim, Will chastised the secretary for "doomsaying" about global warming, arguing that concerns about climate change are just "eco-pessimism." "On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment," Will wrote. "Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones." But as Climate Progress’s Joe Romm observed, "I don’t know whether it is more pathetic that Will believes this or that the Washington Post simply lets him publish this lie again and again." Indeed, despite Will’s history of spreading misinformation about global climate change, the Post and other media outlets have eagerly provided platforms for climate skeptics to distort the scientific consensus around global warming and mislead the public.

WILL IS WRONG: As evidence to support his point, Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979," and he seized on a "since corrected BBC News article" to argue that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has found that "there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." But as TPMmuckraker reported, the Arctic Climate Research Center (ACRC) quickly disputed Will’s conclusion. "We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km," ACRC wrote in a statement shortly after the Post published Will’s column. Similarly, the WMO has written that "the long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing." "The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century." In fact, according to the California Climate Change Center, "by the end of century, snowpack could decrease by as much as 90% in the higher amount of warming — almost double the losses expected under theower warming cases." Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Will has trotted out these discredited arguments. As the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson pointed out, "Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column…almost word for word." Then, as now, Will saw a report that "appeared to confirm what he believes and straight into the Washington Post it went. Neither did Will’s editors at the Post seem to care enough about not misinforming their readers to take ten minutes to delve into any of this."

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Meth pilots some ideas for kids’ shows on TV. More videos at his site.

By Dan Meth, via /film, who graphs the enjoyability of some movies:

Like most cat owners, I am willy nilly a cat observer and, to some degree, a cat behavioral analyst. After much observation, I have come to the conclusion that cats often feel excited before there’s anything to be excited about, and then, having the feeling, cast about for some action that fits the feeling. Thus, for example, a cat will suddenly make a great pounce on a toy lying passively a few inches away, trying to generate enough action to justify the excitement. Or, perhaps, a great jump with flattened ears and then a pounding rush down the hallway into another room, as if being chased by an invisible rabid wolfhound. I wonder to what extent we people have feelings first and then look for excuses for the feeling.

Interesting review of Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America,
by Barry Werth, which begins:

In his spirited and comprehensive 2005 analysis Darwinism and Its Discontents, Michael Ruse argues that "from the beginning, right down to the present, many people have regarded evolution as a kind of biological equivalent to social progress. In this respect, it has been and still is an epiphenomenon on culture."

Ruse’s book is a full-bore defense of what is known as neo-Darwinism, or the "new synthesis," the combination of Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural and sexual selection with what was later learned of genetic inheritance from the initial work of Gregor Mendel. "The key fact about the raw stuff of evolution — Mendelian mutations — is that they are random. Not uncaused, but not appearing in response to the needs of their possessors," Ruse points out, by way of taking issue with the contemporary biologist Edward O. Wilson, and Wilson’s assertion that "progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard, including the acquisition of goals and intentions in the behavior of animals."

The idea that evolution is an ordered progression, societally as well as biologically, has adhered to popular conceptions of Darwinism since the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, but it was more accurately a theme of Darwin’s contemporary and would-be rival, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer (greatly admired by Wilson, according to Ruse) is the guest of honor in Barry Werth’s Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.

Spencer’s manifold view of evolution — value-laden, less empirically rooted than Darwin’s and extending the concepts of natural selection to the social order — matched perfectly the culturally aspirant beliefs of both post-Civil War America and late Victorian England, as Werth puts them on display. It was Spencer, in fact, who coined the term "survival of the fittest," although Darwin went on to make use of it without, as Werth carefully notes, sharing Spencer’s conviction that "survival of the fittest also meant survival of the best." Remarking on Spencer’s "pervasive effect" on late 19th century thought, Darwin’s chief modern biographer, Janet Browne, even contends that "much of what was ultimately attributed to Darwin was the result of philosophical shifts expressed in one form or another by Spencer."

What Werth has done, cleverly, in addition to drawing Spencer out from behind Darwin’s shadow and raising the troubling future specters of Social Darwinism and eugenics, is to create a narrative double helix of his own: We watch as, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, the two principals and their retinues of acolytes and antagonists spin out their ideas to respective advantage in the public sphere. In politics, religion, science and academia, there was foment and division over the meaning and moral implications of what Darwin and Spencer put forth but ready acceptance in many quarters too.

Debate among the elite

Having invoked a very generalized version of evolution prior to Darwin, Spencer "felt the stab of Darwin’s new upheaval keenly," Werth writes, as did Edward Livingston Youmans, Spencer’s publisher and American promoter. Youmans’ efforts to reinforce Spencer’s primacy is a prominent motif in Werth’s book; this is understandable in human terms but hard to justify in a historical sense, for Spencer depended heavily on updating Lamarckian ideas already in circulation.

Yet Werth’s main objective is …

Continue reading.

Today I picked QED’s Special 218 for the obvious reason, and with it got an excellent lather using Simpsons Chubby 1 Best. The Vision with a Swedish Gillette blade provided a very smooth shave—I love the mass of this razor. Stetson aftershave was very nice, and now I’m off to the kitchen for caffeine.

Here’s an example:

Plans to expand a West Bank settlement by up to 2,500 homes drew Palestinian condemnation Monday and presented an early test for President Obama, whose Middle East envoy is well known for opposing such construction.

Israel opened the way for possible expansion of the Efrat settlement by taking control of a nearby West Bank hill of 423 acres. The rocky plot was recently designated state land and is part of a master plan that envisions the settlement growing from 9,000 to 30,000 residents, Efrat Mayor Oded Revivi said.

Israeli officials said any new construction would require several years of planning and various stages of approval.

The outgoing government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said it reserves the right to keep building in large West Bank settlement blocs that it wants to annex as part of a final peace deal with the Palestinians. Efrat is in one of those blocs. Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians envision the territory as part of their future state. …

Continue reading.

Ezra Klein notes:

Disclaimer: The following theory is speculative, not reported. But I’m rather curious whether Tom Daschle’s ouster could have been good for Ron Wyden’s health plan. That’s not to set up illusory tension between the two men: They were famous friends, and I was told that Wyden, like many other senators, was devastated by Daschle’s unexpected withdrawal.

But without Daschle acting as the administration’s central health policy voice, other players are, I’m told, stepping into a more significant role. And some of them are more sympathetic to Wyden’s approach. Peter Orszag, for one. Orszag comes at health care from a cost containment perspective. That’s different than most health care reformers, who care first for covering the uninsured and only then for cutting costs. And it’s a sensibility that has given him some demonstrated affinity for the virtues of Wyden’s plan.

Under Orszag, the CBO was uncommonly helpful to Wyden, partnering for the first time with the Joint Committee on Taxation to produce a "preliminary analysis" of his Health Americans Act. Generally, they score legislation at the point of passage. But this time, in order to help Wyden’s efforts to attract cosponsors, they gave it a "preliminary" score that allowed Wyden to argue that CBO had judged his plan as saving money. Which he did. Often. "The proposal," CBO said, "would tend to become more than self-financing and thereby would reduce future budget deficits or increase future surpluses." On the day the analysis was released, …

Continue reading.

Matthew Yglesias has an excellent post and excellent links for more on this project. Well worth reading. His concluding paragraph should be noted:

The whole F-22 situation, one should note, relates to the broader institutional pathologies of the Air Force. Fighter pilots and former fighter pilots have a tight grip on the Air Force’s top ranks and institutional self-conception. But barring a bad deterioration in the geopolitical situation, the practical future of the Air Force will increasingly be the use of UAVs for surveillance and tactical strikes.

Email from the Center for American Progress:

In 2006, as an Alaska gubernatorial candidate, Sarah Palin filled out a questionnaire emphasizing her support for abstinence education. She wrote that "the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support." Palin’s hard-right views came under fire when it was revealed that her then-17-year-old daughter Bristol was pregnant. In her first public interview, Bristol told Fox News’s chief Palin cheerleader Greta Van Susteren last night that abstinence is "not realistic at all." "I think abstinence is, like — like, the — I don’t know how to put it — like, the main — everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all," Bristol said. When Van Susteren asked Gov. Palin about abstinence later, she seemed similarly dismissive of her former views, admitting, "It sounds naive." Bristol added, "I just — I hope that people learn from my story and just, like, I don’t know, prevent teen pregnancy, I guess." Despite its record of failure, conservatives continue to beat the drum for abstinence-only education. Last week, Republicans were angry that "essential" abstinence education funding had been "eliminated" from President Obama’s recovery and reinvestment bill. A Republican report on the bill expressed its concern "that while abstinence education receives only $176 million annually…contraceptives and family planning already receive $1.6 billion of federal funding."

TIME magazine has picked its selection of the 25 best blogs of 2009. Take a look.

Interesting idea and sounds easy.