"Life of the Party" by William McGurn

Man, I hope Dean Roche reads this speech. Not so much because Roche is so dead wrong on the issue (though that is certainly true), but because Democrats are in such dire need of honest dialogue on an issue that by its very nature can never go away. I also suspect that by shunning honest debate within their ranks they now avoid honest debate with Republicans on a host of other issues.

Washington Post Poll Results

Best site ever!

Lowry on how The FDA Makes You Sick

Clever title. Lowry's, of course, not mine.

Of course the article is more than just a clever title, providing some much needed analysis of the current vaccine debacle. The upshot - "When it ceases to be profitable to make a vaccine (or a prescription drug, or anything else), companies stop making it." Other relevant truths include the following:

* Litigation, regulation, and government pricing have hammered vaccine makers during the past two decades, chasing them out of business.

* Democrats would bring the same model of failure to the prescription-drug market and make it just as unprofitable.

* In the 1980s, many vaccine makers were driven out of business by litigation costs. Congress eventually passed legislation protecting vaccine makers from out-of-control lawsuits.

* Another blow came from Hillary Clinton. She championed getting the government into the pediatric-vaccine business in a big way in the 1990s. It now buys 60 percent of pediatric vaccines, dictating cut-rate prices that have dried up vaccine-manufacturing capacity. More regulation inevitably accompanied the government purchases.

* Rather than more government intervention, what vaccine manufacturers need is the government's permission to innovate so they can move beyond the inefficiencies of the current system.

Here are some other good articles on the subject of drugs:

Drug Prices Are Reasonable

Missing the Point

Also worth checking out is the paper "Prices And Availability Of Pharmaceuticals: Evidence From Nine Countries," which can be found here:
Link

Rosett on the U.N. Oil-for-Food fiasco

Really, what does Kofi Annan have against the long-suffering Iraqi people?

Kengor on the Election in Afghanistan

Helps, every once in awhile, to take a look at The Big Picture. Amazing that we haven't seen more coverage of these extraordinary events.

The Legacy of Deconstruction

Great intro: “It is tempting to say that Jacques Derrida's death has been greatly exaggerated. The French philosopher was so closely associated with nihilism and metaphysical absence that it's perhaps worth wondering whether he ever lived at all.”

Great comment on contemporary academic discourse: “Derrida didn't shrink from writing sentences that rambled on for two or three pages and his books were abstruse and convoluted in the extreme. None of this put off his tweedy admirers, who regarded Derrida's density as further proof of his profundity.”

“Tweedy admirers”!

I think it’s significant that while “deconstructionism” is, as M&M say, passé, “to deconstruct” is as popular as ever as a verb. People toiling in fields far from the groves of academia use it without a second thought, as in cooking (see Link 1); I’d half expect to hear it used by a demolition crew taking down an abandoned building. In the common parlance of our times it is now used as a subsitute for “critically assess,” (see Link 2) and now among scholars and journalists with perhaps the added (and assumed) layer of “so thoroughly that there is really no need to continue the discussion.” (see Link 3)

Deconstructing Chinese Food

Deconstructing Jacko

Deconstructing the Democratic Presidential Candidate

Yikes!

A mention by Jonah Goldberg in today's Corner. How in the Sam Hill did he find it? I certainly never expected this - hoped maybe, but never really expected it. I'd always thought this would be an adventure in solipsism, as I think the benign paranoia of my other site (http://quotidianquintilian.blogspot.com/) makes clear. Pressure's on now, I guess.

If I still have his attention, I'd like to press him for the longer answer about his "bias towards having arguments within groups you agree with more than not." If I understand him correctly, Goldberg isn't using 'bias towards' in the sense of 'against,' but rather in the sense that more productive arguments usually involve parties that have found some common ground to work within. I bring this up only because friends have asked about my statement that "I would rather disagree with conservatives than agree with liberals." The meaning, if not the sentiment, seemed self evident to me at the time, but here goes:

An argument between Michael Ledeen and Daniel Pipes would more than likely yield some interesting results. I'd hazzard that an argument between Micahel Ledeen and Ibrahim Hooper would be less an argument than an exercise in futility. Shows like "Crossfire" and even "Hannity and Colmes" make this pretty clear - over and over again.

Thanks for the notice!

Goldberg's post on bias can be found here

Ramesh Ponnuru on Kerry on Parental Notification

This happens to be the most recent Corner posting as I start up this blog. What are the odds that we'd read this in Newsweek or the New York Times? Clearly exposes the problematic nature of Kerry's response.