Let me be clear, this has nothing to do with whether or not Toyota has a defective car or not. It’s just putting things in perspective so that you can see if the folks in Washington are treating Toyota like they would any other car company with potential defects.
— uo
I guess this is why you need to get into the details of a bill to understand it, but from the surface, isn’t this the exact type of bill that Republicans should support? It’s a jobs bill that is primarily oriented towards business tax cuts! What’s not to like about that?
Just because you’ve been trained to say no to all the stupid things Harry Reid says, doesn’t mean everything that comes out of his mouth is wrong. After all, even a broken, stopped clock is right twice a day.
— uo
Been a while since I last blogged. Spent a lot of time reading, but frankly, just haven’t taken the time to blog. Been too busy having fun with family, or getting stuff done at work.
Anyway, time to get back to the grind. Here are two stories that pretty much sum up everything pretty accurately:
86 percent say government ‘broken’
Wide majorities of Americans do not trust elected officials and think the federal government is “broken,” according to excerpts of a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Monday.
Eighty-six percent of the 1,023 Americans surveyed nationwide said that the government is “broken” compared to only 14 percent who said it is not.
…
Additionally, 75 percent said the word “honest” does not describe their officials in Washington, while only 22 percent said it does.
————————-
Obama helped bring on the healthcare backlash
By leaving the overhaul in the hands of Congress, he has given the public a full view of how lawmakers do business. The result is an anti-Washington mood …
People are fed up — on the right and the left. In fact, I wish the media and the pundits would focus more on what the people have in common with one another, rather than the differences. For instance, this opinion is nearly unanimous. People on the left and people on the right are extremely angry about the bailouts and what’s been done with the money since the banks and other recipients got their hands on taxpayer money. That’s something we can all agree on.
— uo
Apparently, Democrats don’t know the definition of the word “gay”.
Seventy-nine percent of Democrats said they support permitting gay men and lesbians to serve openly. Fewer Democrats however, just 43 percent, said they were in favor of allowing homosexuals to serve openly. Republicans and independents varied less between the two terms.
So Democrats want gays to serve, but they do not want homosexuals to serve?
“I’m laughing at the superior intellect.”
— uo
This retraction really isn’t any new earth-shattering news. Just another chapter in a terrible saga.
Medical journal retracts study linking autism to vaccine
(CNN) — The medical journal The Lancet on Tuesday retracted a controversial 1998 paper that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism.
The 12-year-old study linked autism with the MMR vaccine. The research subsequently had been discredited.
Last week, the study’s lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was found to have acted unethically in conducting the research.
The General Medical Council, which oversees doctors in Britain, said that “there was a biased selection of patients in The Lancet paper” and that his “conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible.”
…
A September 2008 study replicated key parts of Wakefield’s original paper and found no evidence that the vaccine had a connection to either autism or GI disorders. The study, conducted at Columbia University, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also found no relationship between the timing of the vaccine and children getting GI disorders or autism.
The Wakefield study also became part of the evidence that parents cited who did not vaccinate their children.
“The story became credible because it was published in The Lancet,” Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, said Tuesday. “It was in The Lancet, and we really rely on these medical journals.”
Singer, the mother of a child with autism, added, “That study did a lot of harm. People became afraid of vaccinations — this is the Wakefield legacy — this unscientifically grounded fear of vaccinations that result in children dying from vaccine preventable diseases.“
Retractions are rare in medical journals and usually occur as a result of fraud or plagiarism, said Marcia Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
So kids got measles, mumps and rubella and some may have died because they didn’t take the vaccine based on a study that was so rife with errors that a medical journal had to pull the article.
My question is, why would a doctor fabricate a study like this? Brian Deer finds out:
ANDREW WAKEFIELD, the former surgeon whose campaign linking the MMR vaccine with autism caused a collapse in immunisation rates, was paid more than £400,000 by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.
Yowza! So it was all about the money!! By the way, it wasn’t just Wakefield. He had all his cronies feeding from the trough too.
Meanwhile, China shows how to properly deal with the kind of person that would put his own personal gain above the health of society.
China executes ex-head of food and drug agency: Zheng sentenced to death in May for taking bribes to OK substandard drugs
I mean, what’s the difference? Taking bribes to approve substandard drugs that would have kept people from dying had the drugs been real? Or taking bribes from plaintiffs’ lawyers to proclaim a life-saving drug is unsafe, causing patients to get sick and perhaps die unnecessarily?
Andrew, you’re lucky you don’t live in China.
— uo
P.S. – The CNN article at the top of this post sure is a heck of a lot better than that earlier one.
Screenshot of CNN (so they can’t change it later):
That’s it. You see the entire article. When you read this, you’re led to believe that the court set this guy free. But that’s not what happened.
Court: Sentence for millennium plotter TOO LENIENT
SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court said Tuesday a 22-year prison sentence was too lenient for an al-Qaida-trained terrorist convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day 2000.
A divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Ahmed Ressam deserved a much longer prison term because he had reneged on a deal to cooperate with terrorism investigators around the world.
U.S. prosecutors said Ressam’s change-of-heart after two years of cooperation compromised at least two terrorist cases in the U.S., resulting in charges being dropped.
The appeals court also took the rare step of removing from the case the Seattle trial judge who imposed the initial sentence.
Holy snikes! This guy’s not going free. He’s getting the hammer laid down. But you’d never know that from CNN.
No wonder people think there is a media bias.
— uo
On CNBC today, Richard Shelby, Republican and ranking member of the Senate Banking committee, agreed with the presenter and basically stated that proprietary trading by big banks had nothing to do with the crisis.
Really? Richard Shelby is just plain flat wrong when he states prop trading didn’t have anything to do with the crisis.
From a Bloomberg article on Merrill Lynch:
“Fixed-income TRADING revenue was negative $15.2 billion”
NEGATIVE 15 billion? Ouch! That little gem nearly took down the brand-spanking new acquisition of depositor-backed Bank of America.
And from this Dealbook article, it says that “Much of a $5.9 billion third-quarter write-down that Citigroup announced last week came in fixed-income TRADING.”
And that’s just from a quick cursory search!
Is Shelby ignorant of the facts, or is he spinning for someone.
Just a note. I don’t disagree with everything he says. But to say that prop trading wasn’t a factor, even a contributing factor, is just plain wrong.
— uo
I read this section of a Bloomberg article, and it reminded me of what they tell you to do with your cell phone on airplanes.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is trying to determine if electromagnetic interference may be causing the throttle system to malfunction, said the official of the Transportation Department, which oversees NHTSA.
Toyota said it has ruled out electronics as a cause …
So Toyota says the car’s electronics aren’t causing the problem. Then where on earth could interference be coming from? Could it be that the cell phones, which the FAA says may interfere with airplane electronics, are the problem?
PURE SPECULATION on my part. But if I’m right, I’ll get to claim “You read it here first!”
— uo
Unfavorable Odds 