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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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The WSJ has been running a scam for the last few weeks relating to the FDA's pulling the approval of Avastin.
They have run several unsigned opinions that have just been flaming, relating the decision to "ObamaCare" and "Death Panels", although the decision had nothing to do with the health care reform AT ALL.
The drug had been gotten expedited approval a couple of years before, on a compassionate basis, and is supposed to be used for women with end-stage cancer that has not responded to anything else. There had been no real studies as to whether it would work or not, but it works for other cancers.
Well, results are in. A number of high quality studies have now been done, and they all agree. The drug does not work. The FDA brought together an outside expert panel a month before to review all the data, and they voted 11-1 to recommend that the drug approval be withdrawn, and this is what the FDA recommended.
Now, this was NOT part of the consideration..... The drug costs an average of eighty THOUSAND dollars per patient, making the company a BILLION DOLLARS a year for this use. The drug does not work.
But here you've got the WSJ trying to push this agenda in the press on behalf of what I'd guess is a big advertiser. And you wonder why healthcare is so expensive in the US.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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You are currently tied with Corniss for dumbest to ever post here.
You couldn't trade your way out of a paper bag.
Fatty big mouth poser, wanna bet $5000 on who's tax return shows higher trading profit?
Come on big shot. Put up or shut up.
I am tired of your third grade bull crap
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Pull the butt plug, fatty.
Lose those 40 pounds in minutes!
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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All talk and no action Jeff.
Put up or shut up.
Talk is cheap.
Come on big shot.
You ain't sh#t.
$5000. Come on scared pussy
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Christ, what a lying POSER!
Outright plagiarism.
YOU LIE!
Nice work, Matthew
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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I've been pretty happy with my PWE and ETP stocks the last 18 months.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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who thinks pacifists suck? well...er...pacifists do:
Colman McCarthy Was Right
An oikophobic pacifist acknowledges an inconvenient truth.
By JAMES TARANTO
The passage of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, which will give the president discretion to allow military service by open homosexuals, reopens the question of ROTC at elite universities, many of which had cited antigay discrimination as a reason to keep their Vietnam-era bans in place.
Pacifist Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist who "directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and teaches courses on nonviolence at four area universities and two high schools," is unalterably opposed to ROTC. He's received a lot of attention the past few days for an op-ed piece he wrote for the Post in which he describes ROTC as a "taint" on "the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace."
It's a totally wrongheaded and poorly argued piece. But we'd like to focus on the one paragraph in which he says something true:
To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join . . . for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I've had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.
This matches our own experience. When we've encountered American servicemen and recent veterans, we've found them to be some of the finest men, and occasionally women, we've ever met. The military represents the best of America, and it's good to hear even a pacifist admit it.
Alert readers will note that in quoting McCarthy, we have made him the beneficiary of perhaps the most charitable elision in history. We did so because the paragraph contained an invidious and distracting comparison, and we wanted to focus on what McCarthy said that was true. Here's how the full paragraph reads:
To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America's or the Taliban's: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I've had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.
The first thing that must be said about this is that whereas McCarthy knows from experience what American combat veterans are like, his professed admiration for the "soldiers" of the Taliban's "army" is purely notional. What is behind this notion is oikophobia, or disdain for America.
Such an attitude shouldn't surprise us. Unless you are a citizen of a determinedly neutral nation like Sweden, patriotism and pacifism are almost impossible to reconcile. An attachment to one's own country entails the temptation to side with it, and against its enemies, in case of war. And to sustain the belief that war is always the greatest of evils, it is helpful, perhaps necessary, to diminish other evils--hence McCarthy's implied moral equivalence between the America and the Taliban.
With this background, you can see how McCarthy would process the puzzling realization that American warriors are men of exceptionally admirable character. His oikophobia prevents him from considering the possibility that this has anything to do with their being American, so it must be that all warriors--even the Taliban--are admirable.
Wait, did he just say all warriors are admirable? Some pacifist this guy is!
But actually, he goes even further, acknowledging that the people who make up "the peace movement" are of inferior character compared with American military servicemen. To hear McCarthy tell it, they are inferior even to the Taliban. We wouldn't go that far, but we have to agree with his overall point. To the extent that there is such a thing as a "peace movement" in America, its members are a contemptible lot. But why are peaceniks so unworthy?
For one thing, because pacifism is dumb. It is merely the reductio ad absurdum of the trivial truth that war is bad. Philosophers and statesmen have a wide range of opinions as to when going to war is wise, justified or necessary. Only a child or a simpleton thinks the answer is "never." Thus the "peace movement" tends to attract the dull and the immature.
To be sure, under some circumstances it takes courage to stand against one's government. A public pacifist in Nazi Germany, or in Iran or North Korea today, would be an admirable figure notwithstanding the naiveté of his ideology. By contrast, being a pacifist in 21st-century America entails risking exactly nothing. One can even make a comfortable career of it. Just ask Colman McCarthy.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Jeff Fattrad
FRAUD
PLAGIARIST
COUNTERFEITER
STEALS OTHER'S WORK AND CLAIMS AS HIS OWN
YOU LIE!
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Piece of sh#t, phony ass, POSER
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
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Fatty said "We will see modest gains in the stock markets and a modest recovery for the economy in 2011," Mihalka said. "The rebound won't be glitzy and it won't be fun. It will be down-in-the-trenches sort of stuff."
So you basically just said what everyone else in the media has been saying for like 2 years? Congrats on conning them into thinking this was prescient enough to print I guess.
*edit* Oh god just saw the link. Hahaha. Nice catch AC.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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January 4, 2011 4:00 A.M.
I Hate You, Bristol Palin
It’s the happiest of New Years: We have another Palin to drive us crazy.
Okay, I’ve just about had it with you people. Yes, I’m talking to you, the Palin family of Moosewhack Village, Bumblefork County, Alaska, USA, Earth, Universe. I mean, who in the name of old Joe Hill are you to be constantly coming into my living room unannounced and uninvited?
It was bad enough when the most unqualified person in American life — I’m talking to you, Sarah — had the effrontery to run for vice president. It got even worse when, after your well-deserved shellacking at the hands of the most qualified person in America — that would be His Exalted Majesty, the Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Master of the Hoops, and Keeper of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago — you refused to slink off into the obscurity of the Arctic Standard Time Zone, or whatever that place is called where the sun don’t shine. Now you even have your own reality show, on which no moose or caribou is safe.
But while you’re banging away at the wildlife population and then popping their remains in a pot for dinner, you’ve bequeathed us Bristol, little miss Dancing with the Stars and now the proud owner of some choice Arizona real estate, to carry on the family tradition of driving us nuts.
Listen to me: It’s just not right that you Palins are using the trash culture we’ve so lovingly created against us — that was meant to inflict Britney Spears on your wingnut families, not to blast us with Bristol. Teenaged unwed mother? Check. Tabloid fodder? Check. Famous for being famous? Check. Normally, we would endorse all those things, just as, in a rational world, we would embrace Mama Grizzly for her “compelling personal narrative,” as the Finemans of the media like to call it.
But, of course, we don’t. Because we can’t. Because to do so would mean the end of our carefully maintained double standard — and the minute you folks on the right no longer accept your second-class status in the moral pecking order, we are finished.
As is well known, I am a man of consummate fairness and nearly infinite tolerance. Like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, I can tolerate at least six impossible things before breakfast, and in the interests of No Labels civility, I fervently believe that the families of political figures should always and everywhere be off limits.
Except, of course, for you, the Palin family. Because you’re simply intolerable. Your very existence makes the heads of all progressives want to imitate that scene from Scanners and explode in a shower of compassionate brains and blood. Just when we think we’ve finally put you in the ground, you get up and keep coming at us, like the demon spawns of Audie Murphy and Annie Oakley, circling us with your repeating rifles and your white teeth and your flashing gams and your voices that would shatter Waterford crystal.
You are making us mental, you people. The thought of you fills us with an overwhelming desire to see your Harvard transcripts, or at least your high-school diplomas, which we frankly doubt you have. Your very being-ness causes us to doubt our belief in the existence of Gaia and sends us screaming back to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit for comfort and consolation. Watching Bristol waltzing about in a slinky dress on national television and coming in third behind Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey and Disney’s Kyle Massey is enough to cause me to lose control of my Prius and possibly sideswipe a homeless shelter for unwed lesbian mothers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan in our new post-DADT army. I’m sure I’m not alone in my despair.
For you simply won’t go away. Even worse, you have the power to cloud men’s minds. Last fall we rolled out one of our biggest guns — Vanity Fair! — which deployed a Princeton-educated hatchet man named Michael Joseph Gross to chop you up into little pieces. Alas, he couldn’t tell Trig from another baby boy, because as we fair and tolerant lefties know, all Down-syndrome babies look alike. Our bad! Next time, we’ll send someone from a real school, like Columbia. At least he’ll be able to tell Piper from Willow.
Which brings us back to Bristol. Oh, the schadenfreude we experienced when news of her pregnancy broke right in the middle of the campaign! The delight we took when the ex-boyfriend, what’s his name, made the rounds of our sympathetic media shoulders and slammed Sarah for#…#I forget what, exactly. Existing, probably. After all, what would Chris Matthews and Norah O’Donnell and Joe Klein and Andrea Mitchell and Mika Brzezinski have to talk about without the Palins? Politics? Hegel?
And now Bristol’s gone and bought herself a house in Maricopa, Ariz., with some of her Dancing with the Stars swag, the nerve. Doesn’t she realize that, according to Gawker (our bible of snark), it’s a trashy McNeighborhood filled with foreclosed houses, half an hour away from Phoenix? I mean, what young person in her right mind would want to shop for a bargain starter home? Next thing you know, she’ll be moving to Detroit and fixing up an old mansion in Brush Park or Boston-Edison and giving employment to local contractors, and that will just make us hate her all the more.
You see, we liberals are locked in an eternal profane embrace with you, the Palin family. You are the living, breathing antithesis of everything we hold dear — credentialism, law schools, expensive restaurant meals, gun-free zones, live-in mothers-in-law, the Punahou School, and skinny black ties worn with white shirts. Why can’t we quit you?
Time to make lemonade: Bristol’s new house is conveniently located near one of the several hundred McCain residences, and so even a moron can see what I’m about to propose. In the wake of Tron, the air has gone out of the market for film sequels in Hollywood, but reality television — that’s where the money is. So why not this:
Beyond Celebrity Thunderdome II: Bristol Palin vs. Meghan McCain — This Time, It’s Personal. Two babes enter, one babe leaves. Hosted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Because you know — you just know — that one of them is going to run for Meghan’s father’s seat when it next comes up in 2016, by which time we’ll be in syndication and rolling in residuals.
Bristol, honey — have your agent call my agent and let’s make a deal. Better yet, let’s have lunch at Chaya.
— As he explained in Rules for Radical Conservatives, David Kahane still believes in the rightness of the Progressive cause, and in the political genius of BO2, no matter what you wingnuts say. You can try to talk him out of it at kahanenro@gmail.com, or you can become one of his groupies on Facebook, if he’ll have you, which is doubtful.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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January 4, 2011 12:00 A.M.
From Yale to the NFL
Are we still the home of the brave?
Last week, the National Football League called off a game because it was going to snow in Philadelphia. This has not happened before. American football is played under all weather conditions. That is part of its appeal. Snow, rain, freezing temperatures — nothing stops an NFL game.
But last Sunday, the NFL and Philadelphia city officials called off the Eagles–Vikings game because of an imminent snowstorm — in order to protect fans from having to drive at that time.
Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, wrote a scathing column for the Washington Times indicting those who called off the game. He described it as an example of the “wussification” of America.
He was right.
Sadly, this risk-averse/avoid-pain mindset is overtaking America. Anything that entails risk is to be avoided and, when possible, banned. The breast-cancer drug Avastin has just been banned by the FDA because of a side-effect risk. Yet terminally ill breast cancer patients who understand the risks have begged to be allowed to take the drug (even Europe allows it). Peanuts and peanut butter, particularly good sources of protein for kids (because kids actually like and therefore eat peanuts and peanut butter), are banned in more and more schools because of the risk (which is far less than that of being killed by lightning) that peanut-allergic students may die in schools that do not ban peanuts. Desperately needed nuclear power plants are shelved because of the infinitesimally small risk of nuclear-waste-radiation leakage. And now an NFL game is canceled because of the risk that some fans might get into auto accidents in a snowstorm.
Americans are becoming increasingly risk-averse.
Though Governor Rendell is a Democrat, this risk aversion comes from the Left, which has made it its mission to protect people from risk. Risk may lead to pain, and the Left dreams of a pain-free life.
The most left-wing institutions in America, our universities, are therefore the most pain- and risk-averse. That is the reason for speech codes on campuses: No student should have his or her feelings hurt or ever feel “offended.” Likewise, no Christmas trees are allowed lest a non-Christian student feel not included.
That is why Yale University Press last year decided at the last minute to cancel inclusion of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad in the book it was about to publish about the Danish Muhammad cartoons! Too risky. The liberal university now stands for avoiding pain much more than for freedom of speech.
I have a sad confession to make. Whenever I hear or sing the National Anthem, I no longer fully believe its ending — “o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We have many freedom loving and brave Americans — just think of those in the armed forces. But overall, risk has been banned as Americans seek to be immunized against pain.
Needless to say, the liberal Philadelphia Inquirer supported the decision to cancel the football game. And so did some of my callers who think of themselves as conservative. But all those self-identified conservative callers who supported the decision were, I noted on air, under the age of 40.
I explained to them that they have grown up in a different America than I did. The idea of telling an American that a pro-football game is canceled because he might drive in bad weather strikes a conservative over 40 as demeaning. But the young have been raised without monkey bars, dodgeball, or see-saws lest they fall and hurt themselves, and without “Merry Christmas” lest it offend; protected by parents and schools from experiencing the pain of a loss in sports; told they are wonderful when they are not; and otherwise weakened to the point where it seems perfectly natural to cancel a football game because fans may drive in bad weather.
A listener who disagreed with me sent me an e-mail asking how I would feel if my father drove to that game and died in an accident because emergency vehicles could not reach him in time. I responded by giving my correspondent my father’s e-mail address. I told him that I suspected that my father, who is a healthy 92 and fought for three years in World War II, would probably respond that he doesn’t recognize the America of today as the one he fought for 65 years ago.
That’s why the cancellations by the NFL and Yale University are important. Once the home of the brave, America is becoming the home of the risk-averse and the pain-avoiders. And when you are risk-averse you are not only less brave, you are less free. With freedom comes pain, a price more and more Americans don’t want to pay.
— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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You LIE!
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this just in
climber
north fork
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You guys should run for Congress. 38000 posts and still can't agree on anything.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Little pussy Cut and Run ShutUp has not left.
He is hiding under his rock.
Little cockroach,
He has done nothing to get banned.
He has every right to post his political diatribes here.
He will crawl out and blink his eyes later.
Pathetic little pussy chicken little troll.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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ISLAMABAD (AP) - The governor of Pakistan's wealthiest and most populated province was shot dead Tuesday by one of his bodyguards who told interrogators he was angry over the politician's opposition to laws that impose the death penalty for those convicted of insulting Islam.
Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, 56, was a member of the ruling party and a close associate of President Asif Ali Zardari. Friends described him as an outspoken moderate who defended women's rights, minorities and secularism and he was the most high-profile politician assassinated since former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in December 2007.
Taseer vented his opposition publicly - even using Twitter - to hard-line blasphemy laws that effectively order death for anyone convicted of insulting Islam. The laws have come under greater scrutiny in recent weeks after a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death for allegedly insulting Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
"He was the most courageous voice after Benazir Bhutto on the rights of women and religious minorities," said Farahnaz Ispahani, an aide to Zardari and friend of Taseer who cried as she spoke. "God, we will miss him." said Farahnaz Ispahani, an aide to Zardari and friend of Taseer who cried as she spoke. "God, we will miss him."
=
LEB, this brave muslim man is exactly the kind of person that you have been screaming about, in vain. You have been painting muslims as a single color, extreme. You have refused to acknowlege that there are different sects with different belief systems, just as there are different sects of Christians.
There ARE *VERY* bad people in the muslim world. There are also people in the muslim world who are opposed to them. Those in opposition are aligned with western sensibilities, such as this man. When you speak out against ALL muslims, including moderate muslims, you undermine these good people, and strengthen the hand of the radicals.
Just like the imam who is building the mosque near 911, who you have gone so far our out of your way to malign, when there is so much evidence that he is one of the moderates, one of the ones on our side, one of the ones fighting the bad guys.....you want to fight him. Without researching it, without finding out the facts or the truth.
LEB, that is why you are disrespected here. Not because you are conservative, or a non-climber, or a female.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Ok Ron, define PC.
What exactly of PC that you find so aggravating.
Seriously, would like to know, tell us.
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Gary
climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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There is no group more PC than the GOP.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Just keep repeating lines from a 20 year old movie.
So lame, so stupid.
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shut up and pull
climber
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IS OBAMA INTENTIONALLY HURTING THE ECONOMY?
FROM POWERLINE THIS MORNING:
That is the provocative question asked by Peter Schweizer at Big Peace. I think the answer is No, but let's let Peter explain why the question arises at all:
"That may seem like an absurd question, but it's hard to come to any other conclusion when you consider what is happening to our energy industry on the Gulf Coast. As the Wall Street Journal reports today, the Obama Administration may have lifted its ban on drilling in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, but there are still long delays in getting other permits approved to drill for oil. Why? No one seems to know. We assume that politicians do what is in their own self-interest, but in this case Obama seems to be damaging himself because he is dragging down the economy. As the Journal puts it, "The Gulf coast economy has been hit hard by the slowdown in drilling activity." And Obama doesn't seem particularly eager to change that fact."
Schweizer recalls Bobby Jindal's bizarre encounter with President Obama at the height of the Gulf oil spill crisis:
"In his recently released book Leadership and Crisis, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal recounts an exchange with President Obama during the Gulf oil drilling moratorium. (Full disclosure: I co-wrote the book with Jindal.) After telling Obama that the moratorium would potentially cost tens of thousands of jobs, "The president went on to assure me that anyone who lost their job would get a check from BP. When I explained that BP might not write them checks because it was the federal government that imposed the moratorium the president said, 'Well, if BP won't pay the claim, they can file for unemployment.' I was amazed by the level of disconnect. The people of Louisiana want to work, not collect unemployment or BP checks."
For Obama, getting an unemployment check is about the same as getting paycheck.
What I think emerges here is President Obama's astonishing ignorance of economics, which is to say, how the world works. I don't think he is intentionally trying to damage our economy, simply because he knows that he has no chance of being re-elected unless the economy rebounds. At the same time, I think he is so appallingly ignorant of how wealth is created that he believes killing off jobs, as his administration has done along the Gulf Coast, is no big deal. The lost wealth will magically recreate itself, perhaps in the form of unemployment benefits. I think that Obama really does not understand the difference between receiving a paycheck in exchange for creating wealth, and getting a government handout in exchange for nothing. But then, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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