Archive for 2014
September 13, 2014
MICHELLE FIELDS INTERVIEWS RICHARD VEDDER: Failure Penalty: Should Colleges Have Skin in the Student Loan Game? I certainly think so.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Build A Blowgun From Playing Cards.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Jodi Adler, Auntie Jodi’s Helpful Hints.
NOW OUT: The Tennessee Law Review’s new Second Amendment symposium issue. The issue as a whole isn’t online, but you can read my Foreword, The Second Amendment As Ordinary Constitutional Law, on SSRN. And Josh Blackman has rounded up links to all the articles’ online versions.
GUN HERO OF THE DAY.
WHY POLICE SHOULD WEAR BODY CAMERAS: Oakland Firefighter Plays Victim Card Until Police Release Video.
DEREK LOWE: Thiola, Retrophin, Martin Shkrell, Reddit, and More.
Well, it was not a dull evening around the In the Pipeline headquarters last night. I submitted a link to Reddit for my post yesterday about Retrophin and Thiola, and that blew up onto that site’s front page. The Corante server melted under the impact, which isn’t too surprising, since it’s struggling at the best of times. (A site move really is coming, and no, I can’t wait, either, at this point.)
But then, to my great surprise, Martin Shkreli (CEO of Retrophin) showed up in the Reddit thread, doing an impromptu AMA (Ask Me Anything), which I have to say takes quite a bit of aplomb (or perhaps foolhardiness – I don’t think too many other CEOs of any publicly traded corporations would have done it). But not too long after that, the entire thread vanished off the front page, and off of r/News, the subreddit where I’d submitted it.
Then I got a message from one of the moderators of r/News, saying that I’d been banned from it, and going on to say that I would likely be banned from the site as a whole. After having been on Reddit for seven years, that took me by surprise. As best I can figure, the thread itself was reported to r/Spam by someone, and the automated system took over from there. Over the years, I’ve submitted links to my blog posts, and Reddit, or some parts of it, anyway, has been notoriously touchy about that. The last time I submitted such a link, though, was back in February (and before that, August of 2013), so I’m not exactly a human spam-bot. We’ll see what happens. Update: I was banned for some hours, but I’ve been reinstated.
Lately, Reddit seems bigger at banning people and taking things down at the behest of the powerful. Here’s the original post, entitled The Most Unconscionable Drug Price Hike I Have Yet Seen.
Plus: “Businesses can, though, charge what they think the market will bear, and Retrophin’s contribution to cystinuria therapy so far is to have realized that the market will bear a lot more than people had realized. But in an actual market, it would be easier for someone else to come in and compete on price. What Retrophin is planning is to use regulatory loopholes to keep anyone else from doing so, with no time limit until someone at the FDA does something about it.”
PAUL RAHE: Is Obama a War Criminal? “Is killing people via bombing strikes a war crime if it serves no larger strategic purpose, if it is a feckless act apt only to enrage against us those Sunnis who desperately fear the Shia, if it is a cynical maneuver aimed solely at improving the President’s standing in the polls? It is, after all, one thing to seek victory and another to engage in aimless mayhem.”
Plus: “The war in Iraq and Syria really is a war of Barack Obama’s making. Had he kept a body of troops in Iraq to encourage Maliki to honor the arrangements he had worked out with the Kurds and the Sunni, Al Q’aeda in an even more malevolent form would not have made a comeback. Had he vigorously backed the secular reformers in Syria, Bashar al-Assad would have been ousted some time ago, and ISIS would never have secured a foothold. His fecklessness in the past is now, however, going to be compounded by his fecklessness in the present.”
IN THE MAIL: From Tony Daniel & David Drake, The Savior (General (Drake)).
Also, today only at Amazon: 50% off NYDJ.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 492.
HMM: Sarah Palin: I owe America an apology because John McCain should be president. See, I don’t think so. McCain polled his highest — the only time he was ahead of Obama — after the Palin pick. He lost his lead when the financial crisis struck at a crucial time, and when he pulled that idiotic “campaign suspended” stunt.
LOUDER WITH CROWDER: Is Moderate Islam A Myth?
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Report: Sen. Landrieu took nine more ‘suspicious’ flights.
Louisiana U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu took nine charter flights — costing taxpayers nearly $15,000 — that coincided with campaign events where she raised over $130,000, in possible violation of federal law.
The nine flights are in addition to several others that were discovered last month.
On Friday, the Republican National Committee released records of the flights, which Landrieu expensed to her Senate office — and ultimately to taxpayers — between 2000 and 2008.
All of the flights coincided with fundraisers she held in Louisiana.
On May 31, 2000, for example, Landrieu expensed $1,531 for a flight from New Orleans to Alexandria, La. On the same day, according to records published by the RNC, she raised $28,150 from Alexandria-area businessmen.
The rest of the records are similar, with flights ranging in cost from $950 to $2,379.
If Landrieu did indeed use her Senate office account to pay for the chartered flights, that would be in violation of federal law and Senate rules, which prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars from paying for campaign activities.
If she were a Republican, the Eric Holder Justice Department would probably be moving to indict.
SO HOW’S THAT GOING FOR YOU NOW, CHAMP? Read this 2008 op-ed by candidate Obama on Iraq. Then laugh, or cry.
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INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: DOJ Working With Elijah Cummings To Protect The IRS. “As we reported, Holly Paz, the deputy of Lois Lerner who headed the IRS division handling tax-exempt organizations, had forwarded True the Vote’s 990 forms (on which nonprofit groups report their financial information) to Cummings’ stafF. Now we have Brian Fallon, a former aide to New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and a communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder, who mistakenly called Issa’s office thinking it was the office of Cummings and asked for help in leaking documents to selected reporters for the purpose of creating media spin before Issa and his committee could make them public. . . . This tangled web of corruption and deceit does not end at the IRS but weaves its way through the corridors of the Justice Department and the halls of Congress.”
REALLY, JUST DON’T SEND YOUR KIDS TO COLLEGE. THEY’VE APPARENTLY BECOME PSYCHOTIC PITS OF DESPAIR: College: Students must agree ‘why’ they had sex to avoid sexual assault charges.
At Ohio State University, to avoid being guilty of “sexual assault” or “sexual violence,” you and your partner now apparently have to agree on the reason WHY you are making out or having sex. It’s not enough to agree to DO it, you have to agree on WHY: there has to be agreement “regarding the who, what, where, when, why, and how this sexual activity will take place.”
There used to be a joke that women need a reason to have sex, while men only need a place. Does this policy reflect that juvenile mindset? Such a requirement baffles some women in the real world: a female member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights told me, “I am still trying to wrap my mind around the idea of any two intimates in the world agreeing as to ‘why.’”
Ohio State’s sexual-assault policy, which effectively turns some welcome touching into “sexual assault,” may be the product of its recent Resolution Agreement with the Office for Civil Rights (where I used to work) to resolve a Title IX complaint over its procedures for handling cases of sexual harassment and assault. That agreement, on page 6, requires the University to “provide consistent definitions of and guidance about the University terms ‘sexual harassment,’ ‘consent,’ ‘sexual violence,’ ‘sexual assault,’ and ‘sexual misconduct.’” It is possible that Ohio State will broaden its already overbroad “sexual assault” definition even further: Some officials at Ohio State, like its Student Wellness Center, advocate defining all sex or “kissing” without “verbal,” “enthusiastic” consent as “sexual assault.”
This whole thing is a Title IX violation, creating a hostile environment for male students. And, I might add, with conscious intent.
SPENGLER: Why Did Middle Eastern Christians Drive Sen. Cruz from the Stage?
When Sen. Ted Cruz told an audience of Middle Eastern Christians that they have no better friend than Israel, he stated the literal truth: the Assyrian Christians of Iraq’s north are at greater risk than any Christian population in the world, and their only effective defenders are the Kurdish Peshmerga, which was trained and armed by Israel almost from inception. These facts are widely known. Why, then, did Sen. Cruz’s remarks provoke an eruption of Jew-hatred? A large part of the audience could not control its rage, and drove their keynote speaker from the podium. There’s a history, and a sad one.
Related: Lee Smith: Unsavory Bedfellows; It’s not easy protecting the Christians of the Middle East.
WAR? JOHN KERRY SAID IT WASN’T A WAR. Roll Call: How Obama Will Pay for His War. “The White House doesn’t know yet how much the new war with ISIS will cost, but it knows how it will pay for it: the all-purpose war funding credit card. Officially known as Overseas Contingency Operations, it’s the catchall account used to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that is now funding the war against the group also known as the Islamic State or ISIL.”
Remember when Obama was criticizing Bush for “two wars fought on the credit card?” That was a lie. This isn’t.
THEY KEEP TELLING US VOTER FRAUD IS A MYTH, AND THEN THEY KEEP GETTING CAUGHT DOING IT: The Hill: Voter fraud probe roils Ga. Senate race. “A group helmed by a major donor and policy adviser to Democratic Senate candidate Michele Nunn is under investigation by the Georgia secretary of State for alleged voter fraud. . . . Nunn is running against Republican David Perdue for a Senate seat left open by the retirement of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). Democrats see the race as a pick-up opportunity in a year where they are largely playing defense.”