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  • RBC transition

    The Reality-Based Community is updating its software, thanks to the expert help of Michael Spitzer at Spitzer Creative.. We're moving to the newest version of WordPress, and also changing hosting companies. The url will remain the same, but the RSS feed is now: http://www.samefacts.com/feed/ The RSS will now send a link' [...]
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    Posted: September 05, 2009, 9:09pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Financing drug and medical device R&D

    Megan McArdle worries that, since some of the absurdly exorbitant cost of health care in the United States goes to finance research and development into new drugs and devices, cutting back on that expenditure is likely to cut into the R&D activity. It's hard to argue that her worry is [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 6:42pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • On Van Jones: An RBC Dissent

    It's always risking disagreeing with Harold, because the odds of being wrong asymptotically approach 100%. But I'm going to, anyway: I think that Jones should stay. This is all in the manner of Inside-the-Beltway scalp-chasing: you give them one, they'll ask for another. Van did something really stupid five years ago. [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 10:37am EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • A sad moment to man up: Van Jones needs to go

    Van Jones has been wrongly savaged by rightwing commentators. Unfortunately, it turns out that Jones handed them his own head by signing a 2004 petition that embraced 9/11 conspiracy stuff about the Bush administration. (Kate Sheppard provides details.) This is politically damaging at a critical moment, and the petition was [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 8:01am EDT
    by Harold Pollack

  • A Peasants' Revolt

    As a follow-on from my post on Google Books, a surreal example of copyright maximalism from Spain. Via reporter Álvaro Corcuera in El Pais; the article was translated for the IHT insert yesterday, which they put on the Web without an archive (why?). The Spanish performing rights collective, the Sociedad [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 2:28am EDT
    by James Wimberley

  • Stopped-clock Dep't

    I hate to admit it, but the right wing has a point when it complains that our schools sometimes fail to teach patriotic values. Why, when I was in school, we were taught to respect the President of the United States. [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 12:59am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • One-sentence health insurance reform

    "Any health insurance provider must offer to any individual, on the same terms and rates, any policy of insurance that it offers to any other individual or group, and no such policy may exclude coverage of any pre-existing condition." Period. End of bill. That provision, standing alone, resolves the problem [...]
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    Posted: September 03, 2009, 11:17am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • "After the shooting stops"

    Video of a panel on drug policy reform from Netroots Nation: Ryan Grim, Radley Balko, David Bratzer, Jonathan Caulkins. Oh, yeah, and some guy from UCLA who talks too much. [...]
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    Posted: September 02, 2009, 8:10pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • 168,178,719

    The total number of book titles in the world, according to the head of metadata (geekspeak for cataloguing) for Google Books, "when we counted them last Friday". I got this nugget from a splendid post at Language Log by Geoff Nunberg, slamming the very numerous mistakes in the catalogue. Some are [...]
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    Posted: September 02, 2009, 5:04am EDT
    by James Wimberley

  • Richard Viguerie pisses on Ted Kennedy's grave

    Our wingnuts are a class act, all the way. It’s not my purpose or intent to list his sins and weaknesses or those of his brothers, John and Robert. But while these are mostly covered up or overlooked by the national media, all conservatives know the mistakes of a conservative [...]
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    Posted: September 01, 2009, 1:48pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Another drug legalization pitch

    Esquire publishes yet another drug-leglization screed. Whoever does press relations for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition deserves a bonus. Demolition of the argument (if you can call it that) is left as an exercise for the reader. A few hints, just to get you started: 1. Alcohol - the drug we [...]
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    Posted: September 01, 2009, 11:12am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • The execution of an innocent man

    If Cameron Todd Willingham had followed his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to burning his three daughters to death, accepting a life sentence instead of risking the death penalty, we would probably never have known that he was innocent. Because he was on Death Row, his conviction - based on' [...]
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    Posted: September 01, 2009, 4:58am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • George F. Will Cuts and Runs

    According to Politico, George Will's next column will call for a withdrawal of US ground troops from Afghanistan: “[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, [...]
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    Posted: August 31, 2009, 7:42pm EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • The Fire This Time

    Here in southern California, we are currently living through our annual late August-early September ritual of wildfires. In the San Fernando Valley, where I live, the air is heavy with smoke, and people are staying inside. It was worse in Pasadena, where I attend a Quaker meeting, and where the [...]
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    Posted: August 30, 2009, 6:36pm EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • Does Bill Bradley Understand Republicans?

    I always liked Bill Bradley when he was a Senator, but as a bipartisan dealmaker, he leaves something to be desired: Since the days of Harry Truman, Democrats have wanted universal health coverage, believing that if other industrialized countries can achieve it, surely the United States can. For Democrats, universal coverage [...]
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    Posted: August 30, 2009, 5:41pm EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • Gun possession by felons

    Per Eugene Volokh, the North Carolina Supreme Court finds that a lifetime ban on firearms possession by those convicted of non-violent felonies violates the North Carolina Constitution. Putting aside for the moment the questions of (1) whether the analysis is right (though as a non-expert I find the reasoning in [...]
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    Posted: August 30, 2009, 10:13am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Reforming regulatory benefit-cost analysis

    At one level, all policy analysis starts with benefit-cost analysis: on what basis could one choose among option except their advantages (benefits) and their disadvantages (costs)? That makes it puzzling, at first blush, that benefit-cost analysis should be controversial; when it comes to environmental and safety regulation, benefit-cost is beloved [...]
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    Posted: August 30, 2009, 11:19pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Ted Kennedy's funeral: the one discordant note

    It takes a touch of divine grace to upstage President Obama from the pulpit at your father’s funeral. Ted Kennedy, Jr. accomplished that rare feat with his beautiful eulogy this morning. Listening to Yo-Yo Ma, Susan Graham, and Placido Domingo perform so beautifully in that beautiful setting, enjoying the unfeigned [...]
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    Posted: August 29, 2009, 2:07pm EDT
    by Harold Pollack

  • Health Care: The LA Times Gets Spun AGAIN

    The Los Angeles Times is, of course, the nation's worst newspaper, and Janet Hook's piece yesterday on health care shows why. Hook got spun so completely that I'm sure she doesn't even know which direction she faces when she sees the sun set. Her article announces a "growing consensus" on a [...]
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    Posted: August 29, 2009, 12:48pm EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • Federalism and the public option III

    Harry Reid, searching for a way out, is mulling over a public option that isn't public and run by the Feds, maybe, um, a sort of coop. In the current deranged climate, it's possible that Reid's problem really is the connection of Obamacare with the evil Feds, who make such a' [...]
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    Posted: August 29, 2009, 5:03am EDT
    by James Wimberley

  • Query

    If California's sex offender registration didn't cover 109,000 people, including teenagers who took pictures of their teenage girlfriends, do you think the state parole officers and local cops might be able to keep track of convicted rapists on parole closely enough to notice if they're keeping sex slaves? [...]
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    Posted: August 29, 2009, 9:33pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Worthwhile German Initiative

    The multiple problems of poor African countries are so overwhelming that it's hard to know where to start. Or maybe not. Interesting things happened when a coalition of German aid groups tried, as a last resort, giving people in a Namibian village enough money to live on. Three points: --the complaints of the [...]
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    Posted: August 28, 2009, 6:28pm EDT
    by Andrew Sabl

  • Psychoanalysis Session: Max Baucus Edition

    After delaying Senate Finance Committee negotiations three separate times, ranking member Charles Grassley now says that he wants a further delay in coming up with a Finance Committee health care bill. An estimated 3 people nationwide were surprised at this. The trouble is that one of those three people apparently is [...]
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    Posted: August 28, 2009, 8:17am EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • Cures

    Three years ago a 39-year-old American man arrived at the haematology clinic of Berlin's sprawling Charité hospital. (The venerable Charité, one of the great names in the history of medicine, used to be in East Berlin, but it's now the brand for the merged university hospitals of the whole city.) [...]
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    Posted: August 28, 2009, 3:45am EDT
    by James Wimberley

  • A transactions tax?

    The Financial Times reports that the chief financial regulator in the UK has endorsed a "Tobin tax" on financial transactions.* With Sarkozy already on board, this might pave the way for coordinated movement by the governments of all the big financial centers; otherwise, anyone who imposes such a tax risks [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 8:57pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Regime change coming in Japan?

    It looks as if Japan, after fifty years as effectively a one-party state under the LDP, is about to have that tradition shattered by a landslide victory for the Democratic Party of Japan. And it appears that this will not merely be a change of personnel; it might herald a [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 8:41pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • From the Language Police Blotter: Quite Interesting!

    The FT's Don Sull reviews Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, Michael Lewis' Moneyball, and Deborah Coen's Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty. He says he finds them all "quite interesting", and then quickly adds this caveat: Note to English readers: When Americans say "quite," they mean "very," while interesting implies they' [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 3:28pm EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • First they came for grandma ...

    ... and then they decided to deny you health care because you're a Republican. That's not from some wingnut outfit; that's from the Republican National Committee. Oh, wait ...' [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 1:37pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • A Ted Kennedy anecdote

    Francis Bator was Deputy National Security Adviser to Lyndon Johnson, running the rest of the world while Walt Rostow made Vietnam safe for democracy. He recalls a visit to the Oval Office by Sens. Richard Russell of Georgia, John Pastore of Rhode Island, and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. All three [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 10:19am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Teaching in tough times

    It seems to me that Mike O'Hare starts from a false premise in his analysis of whether UC professors should deliver less teaching in response to the decision - taken by the university administration but driven by the legislature and the governor - to pay us less money. That analysis' [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 3:11am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Academic luftmensch takes reality shower

    Tomorrow is my first day teaching for the fall semester. Not my first by decades, but distinguished for me by a deeply dismaying failure of my company's leadership and of the State of California's political machinery. The second has been discussed exhaustively; we've tied a Gordian knot involving so many' [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 1:15am EDT
    by Michael O'Hare

  • "Proud right wing terrorist," on video

    Here's the video of the town hall where Rep. Wally Herger called a constituent "a great American" after the constituent described himself as "a proud right-wing terrorist." On the one hand, it's clear that the constituent wasn't actually endorsing terrorism. He identifies himself as a teabagger, and seems to be suggesting' [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 12:25am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Horror stories

    The Huffington Post is running a series of stories about the disasters that can face people under the current health insurance system. And Rep. Jackie Speier invited one of the victims to address her town hall. Good move! Reason is on our side, but reason alone can't beat fear and' [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 12:09am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Simple Answers to Simple Questions: Steve Pearlstein Edition

    Steve Pearlstein catalogues the grotesque lies and manipulations of the Republican Party in general and Michael Steele in particular. He concludes by asking: Have you no shame, sir? Have you no shame? No. This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions. [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 10:49pm EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • Playing with matches

    "To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men."* Chuck Grassley is a coward. TEMPERS FLARE AT GRASSLEY MEETING By IAN SCHMIT POCAHONTAS - President Barack Obama is a fascist. This and other assertions flew through an emotionally-charged town hall meeting conducted by Sen. Chuck Grassley Monday in Pocahontas. "The president of" [...]
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    Posted: August 26, 2009, 1:05pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Edward Kennedy, RIP

    Everyone will have their own memories and views, of course: here is a great one by Charles Pierce from 2003. I suppose for me, one thing that stands out about Ted Kennedy was that he could find his true calling once he had finally put away what everyone else told [...]
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    Posted: August 26, 2009, 8:02am EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • "Outdated theories and folklore"

    Texas seems to have sent an innocent man to his death. Of course, Justice Scalia doesn't think there's anything unconstitutional about that. They gave him a fair trial, you know. Yes, the forensics evidence has now been found to have relied on "outdated theories and folklore." But that's life in the' [...]
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    Posted: August 26, 2009, 1:46am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • A cap-and-trade system in India?

    Well, here’s something potentially significant: India has approved in principle new trading plans centred on energy efficiency as part of efforts to shift to a greener economy to fight climate change, opening up a potential market worth more than $15 billion by 2015. … The plan involves creating a market-based mechanism that would [...]
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    Posted: August 25, 2009, 8:45pm EDT
    by Jonathan Zasloff

  • Why are the victims of the current health insurance system being ignored?

    Melissa Bass of the Public Policy Leadership department at the University of Mississippi asks a good question, to which I don't have a good answer: Do you know why the health care town hall meetings are dominated by crazy opponents ranting about what health insurance reform may do to them (but' [...]
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    Posted: August 25, 2009, 8:14pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Steven Pearlstein: "Have you no shame, sir, have you no shame? "

    I've been wondering when someone was going to point out that the right wing, which has been screaming for years about the "entitlements crisis" and "out-of-control Medicare spending," is now whipping up seniors to oppose health insurance reform by threatening that it would ... rein in Medicare spending. The latest' [...]
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    Posted: August 25, 2009, 7:25pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Top Five Things you should know about the CIA Inspector General's Interrogation Report

    Having read reports of the the report yesterday, I decided to read the whole enchilada myself. I encourage RBC readers to do the same -- no matter what you think of detentions and interrogations, it's an eye-opener. My top five findings are below: 1. The CIA was not a rogue elephant. The' [...]
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    Posted: August 25, 2009, 4:02pm EDT
    by Amy Zegart

  • Lost cause purgatory

    Paul Krugman has proposed the term "economic purgatory" for the current situation of jobless recovery. It's a lost cause I know arguing with Krugman, but let me record a dissent for posterity. I'm no closer to to a mediaeval Catholic than he is, but Dante's and Aquinas' concept of purgatory is [...]
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    Posted: August 25, 2009, 2:45pm EDT
    by James Wimberley

  • Historical footnote

    ... for those now claiming that doing health insurance reform through the budget reconciliation process would be unprecedented: COBRA, the law under which employees who leave their jobs can keep their health insurance, is an acronym. It originally stood for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985. (That's right: it' [...]
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    Posted: August 24, 2009, 5:18pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Pious cruelty

    One reason I think atheists should avoid any tinge of religious bigotry is that we're simply not as good at it as the other side. Even P.Z. Myers wouldn't imagine separating a child from her adoptive parents because their beliefs differ from his. Bot some of the Godly are made [...]
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    Posted: August 24, 2009, 12:22pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Great American terrorists

    Northern California Republican Congressman Wally Herger held a "town hall" at which he described health insurance reform as "a threat to democracy." Then: One speaker said he could trace his ancestors back to the Mayflower and said “they did not arrive holding their hands out for help.” “I am a proud [...]
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    Posted: August 23, 2009, 11:42am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • The irrationality of "rational expectations"

    Wingnut "proofs" that government spending doesn't actually stimulate the economy have something in common with the aerodynamic analysis that shows a bumblebee can't fly: when the facts conflict with your theory, it's the theory that's supposed to yield. But Robert Frank points out the obvious fallacy in the argument that [...]
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    Posted: August 23, 2009, 11:27am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Heroin as heroin treatment

    It has worked decently well in parts of Europe, and a new experiment in Canada lends support to the idea. I'd like to see it tried here. On the other hand, I'd also like to see methadone freed of the restrictions imposed by the Narcotic Addict Treatment Act. I'd also like' [...]
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    Posted: August 23, 2009, 1:05am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • "Phony claims, meant to divide us"

    Obama calls bullsh*t. Maybe he should sound angrier. But it's quite possible that his calm persona will wear better than the hysteria he confronts. [...]
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    Posted: August 23, 2009, 12:40am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • Why do Republicans want to have more crime?

    Now that the wingnuts and their Republican allies in Congress have managed to make something as anodyne as paying for voluntary counseling in the preparation of Advance Directives into a plot to kill off old people, they've decided to start at the other end of the age distribution. They're trying [...]
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    Posted: August 22, 2009, 12:23am EDT
    by Mark Kleiman

  • The false McCoy

    Betsy McCaughey (turns out to be pronounced "McCoy") survived her appearance on the Jon Stewart Show.. Stewart did a much better job than most "real" reporters would have done in calling her on her b.s., but she responded like a true sociopath, unabashed when she was caught lying and always [...]
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    Posted: August 21, 2009, 1:48pm EDT
    by Mark Kleiman
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