Hi, just a quick hit-and-run introduction. It is nice to use Blogger WYSYWIG again, though scheduling posts in advance is a nice thing about MovableType which I am missing right now - it means I'll have to actually get up in the morning to post here!
Some of you may know me from my old, mostly political blog Science And Politics. I also used to run a purely science blog Circadiana about circadian rhythms and the biology and medicine of sleep. I also wrote an education blog - The Magic School Bus. You can check out my best old political and science posts from those three blogs if you want.
Those three are shut down now, as I am one of 45 or so bloggers now happily hosted by Seed Magazine's ScienceBlogs. My new blog there, A Blog Around The Clock is a fusion of the old three blogs. There, I write about science much more than I used to before. Again, mostly about my own area of expertise - the science of chronobiology, i.e., about circadian rhythms, both in humans and in other organisms, as well as the science and medicine of sleep.
I also write about other areas of science, including evolution, ecology, physiology, neuroscience and ecology. And of course, bitching about the sad state of science reporting. And there are still posts about education, especially science education, the life in academia, posts about blogging, personal and fun posts.
But I have not entirely stopped writing about my favourite topics - ideology, religion, politics and sex (both in humans and in other critters) and the way those four things interact.
So, I hope you come and visit me one of these days. And also see my 44 SciBlings over there - it's not just Pharyngula, there are a lot of other good bloggers there.
I am scheduled to guest-blog here on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday mornings and I will try to write a few posts about sex, science and politics and how they relate to each other. I may also come by on Friday afternoon if olvlzl does not manage to get on to Blogger to post at that time.
While I keep my science writing, and even my science blogging, to the highest standards of accuracy, my posts about other topics, e.g., politics, ideology and sex, are more likely to be speculations, stuff from my own experience, or just a way to vent frustration. Often, they are a way to state, on purpose, something controversial. This is a great way to get a lot of comments. I love nothing better than to be put in my place by a smart, informed commenter who provides links to information that proves me wrong. That is how I learn something new every day. I hope you do not go on vacation and wait for Echidne to come back but enjoy yourselves in the comments this week as well.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Guest Post by Skylanda: Profit, Ethics, Big Pharm, and One Little Girl
Cassie* was just six years old last January when she started to turn pale and feel an unfamiliar ache in her bones. The change was so gradual that months passed before her parents became worried enough to take her to the pediatrician. But before the appointment was scheduled, she was rushed to the emergency room, so weak she could barely stand; by the end of the evening Cassie was diagnosed with ALL: acute lymphocytic leukemia. The white cells that are supposed to defend her body from microbial invasion had instead grown like a parasite in her marrow, strangling out the vital tissues that produce red blood cells and platelets. (*not her real name)
Childhood leukemia is now a treatable disease. Thirty years ago, she probably would have died after a few months of cutting-edge yet still clumsy treatment. A hundred years ago, before people learned to type and transfuse blood, she would have died within weeks, so anemic that she was. Today, about 85% of childhood ALL cases in kids achieve permanent remission with chemotherapy - a minor miracle of modern pharmaco-chemistry that highlights how the laboratory bench is just as important in medicine as compassion and caring.
But Cassie’s rosy outlook shattered when her cancer was genotyped a week later to discover exactly what had caused the wildfire growth of malignant cells. She turned out to have a rare subtype of ALL – one that placed her squarely in the 15% that don’t beat cancer in the first round. In fact, most kids with her genetic twist don’t beat cancer at all. Cassie had the Philadelphia chromosome.
In 1960 researchers in Pennsylvania began to describe a cancerous white cell in which a piece of the ninth chromosome had switched places with a piece of the twenty-second chromosome. No one understands why this happens, but the protein that is read off one of these abnormal strands is named – in the peculiar parlance of molecular biology – bcr-abl. Bcr-abl belongs to a family of enzymes called tyrosine kinases, which are involved in signalling cells to reproduce. Normally, tyrosine kinases are turned off and on by other enzymes, but the mutant bcr-abl protein locks the cell’s reproductive cycle into the on position, spiralling that cell into self-perpetuating expansion which takes over the marrow with ever-multiplying clones. This so-called 9:22 translocation – the “Philadelphia chromosome”– is the basis for most cases of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), which mainly affects older adults, and also for a small percentage of ALL cases like Cassie’s.
This arcane bit of biochemical mechanistics sat on the shelf for several decades without much clinical importance, but it held out a tantalizing implication: if a cancer is caused by a well-described signalling error, could a drug be invented that inhibits the mutant enzyme alone, gumming up the machinery that causes the malignant transformation without poisoning the body’s normal cells?
This was the burning question Dr. Brian Druker asked in the early 1990s when he began a cooperative project with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant now known as Novartis to test compounds that showed promise in blocking the bcr-abl protein. Modern cancer chemotherapy broadly targets rapidly dividing cells – including both cancerous and normal cells – which is in part why chemo patients lose their hair and battle intractable gastrointestinal problems. Some clinicians quietly mutter that this treatment will one day be regarded the way we now look at bloodletting: as a barbaric and primitive strategy which too often causes more harm to the long-suffering patient for too little gain.
Druker and other visionaries sought to change all that. Using the specific molecular biology of an individual type of cancer cell, narrow-spectrum drugs could be invented that circumvent the scorched-earth tactics of standard chemotherapy. These hypothetical drugs would not be a “magic bullet” for cancer at large; they would be a magic bullet for a particular type or even subtype of cancer. By 2001, a particularly promising tyrosine kinase inhibitor known as imatinib – branded by Novartis under the name Gleevec – set the record for the fastest drug approval ever by the FDA, effectively transforming CML from a fatal disease into a chronic disorder, and giving new hope for patients with Philadelphia-positive ALL.
But this radical advance came at an immense cost, a gamble that pharmaceutical companies make with every compound they consider: the price of developing a drug like Gleevec from start to finish is estimated at up to $800 million. With only about 4500 CML cases (and a handful of Philadelphia-positive ALL cases) annually in America, those R&D costs must be recovered from a small pool of patients, whose insurance – if they have insurance – is billed over $25,000 a year for a patented drug that many patients will take for the rest of their lives. Invoking cash numbers of this scale inevitably raises debate about access and equity in the distribution of vital medicines, and Novartis has hardly escaped this fray. In fact, Novartis has inadvertently positioned itself at the vortex of an economic and ethical storm.
The controversy started when Novartis made the grandiose promise that no patient on the planet who could benefit from Gleevec would go without. Besides several unresolved logistical complications (including the fact that Gleevec was not yet approved in many nations), this promise came with some hefty strings attached. Novartis warned India – one of the world’s largest emerging markets for pharmaceuticals – that the charity would end if the nation allowed any generic knock-offs of Gleevec. In Korea, the government set the prices for Gleevec far below the open market value, and supplies of the drug dwindled while the Novartis and the Korean government bickered over the issue. All over the developing world, Novartis has been accused of using its charitable donations as a strategy to enter a market and then leverage patients into lobbying for governments and private insurers to reimburse for this medication, whose cost far outweighs the average per capita health care spending in many developing nations – sometimes by a factor of ten or even one hundred-fold.
It is tempting to unilaterally condemn Novartis for their exploitation of a vulnerable population, holding leukemia patients hostage to a life-saving drug and demanding a monetary tribute neither they nor their cash-strapped nations can reasonably afford. But without the pharm company’s investment, Gleevec never would have come off the shelf and into patients’ mouths – in fact, it is said that Druker had to gently strong-arm Novartis into investing in the compound at all, because the revenue on such a drug was not projected to bring in sufficient profit. Now Novartis has only a few short years until the patent runs out to recover the initial investment – a chunk of money they put down without a guarantee of any return at all (indeed, most compounds examined by biotech companies never make it out of the test tube, and biotech firms routinely swallow those unrecoverable funds as a cost of doing business). Critics counter that Gleevec would never have existed without the initial research that identified the Philadelphia chromosome - research that Novartis certainly did not fund or compensate anyone for – and that Druker’s work was carried out in a lab supported largely by Oregon Health & Science University, a public medical school in Portland. The fact that Novartis regularly nets over a billion dollars annually on its aggregate drug sales does not lend the company much sympathy from activists either.
In any case, Novartis’ heavy-handed tactics may have already backfired. In January of 2006, the agency that controls patent rights in India ruled that Gleevec is not protected, and half a dozen Indian pharmaceutical makers are now racing into the market to undercut Novartis’ price by up to 90% and effectively end the monopolistic practices allowed by patent rights. This is good news for Indian patients who have sold house and home – even bankrupting themselves – to purchase Gleevec when the promised charitable donations did not come through smoothly. But it may be bad news for sufferers of other diseases that have potential drugs in the pipeline; with patent rights threatened under this precedent, research and development may be hindered by this sharp downward adjustment in projected revenues in the large Indian market.
There is yet a far more fundamental question in the provision of expensive drugs to developing nations: do poor countries really need a fancy new cancer drug? This question addresses what economists call the “opportunity cost” – the list of things you cannot do because you put your money into another activity. One might question what other health assets or advances could be purchased with the $25,000 per patient per year that nations outside India might still have to pay for access to Gleevec. Blowing such a large chunk of public cash on one cancer patient may seem crassly unjust in nations where such money could treat hundreds of tuberculosis, AIDS, or malaria patients – yet that policy is exactly what Novartis is pedalling by exerting pressure on patients to lobby their governments for full reimbursement for Gleevec. On a grander scale, one might ask why a company is spending $800 million on drugs for diseases that affect about 5000 Americans per year when the world is struggling to treat millions of TB patients with drugs that are increasingly inadequate against resistant strains. These questions become even more pressing in light of the fact that novel drugs are now in the pipeline to combat resistance to Gleevec that emerges in many patients on chronic therapy – in effect throwing even more resources into a rare disease that has already merited one miracle drug.
The conflict engendered by pricey drugs is by no means limited to developing nations. In the US, a similar controversy is likely to brew in the coming months over Avastin, which inhibits certain tumors from building the blood vessels needed to feed their growth – at a cost of $100,000 per patient per year, a number which causes patients and insurers alike to balk. Herceptin (a synthethic antibody that marks certain types of breast cancer cells for destruction by the immune system) made headlines in Britain last year when the National Health Service refused to pay the equivalent of $35,000 a year for women in the early stage of the disease to receive the drug. The NHS grounded their decision in the evidence, which had yet to prove any positive effect for women with early cancer, since the drug was largely developed for difficult-to-treat metastatic disease. Moreover, the NHS must control expenditures so that all British citizens can get basic and advanced care without bankrupting the system. The women who challenged the decision argued that with their lives are at stake, any chance of benefit would be worth the cost – and the NHS eventually backed down and agreed to pay for the treatment. The decision was hailed as a landmark advance for patient rights, but by further straining and already-stressed national health system, this victory may help a vocal minority of patients at the expense of other beneficiaries who are less empowered to demand their rights.
It may seem as if these opposing groups – the NHS versus breast cancer patients, pharmaceutical companies versus impoverished leukemia patients – are speaking different languages: one of hard numerical reality and the other of the unquantifiable value of their own lives, with an added subtext of controversy regarding patient autonomy over treatment decisions that are historically left only to doctors (and more recently placed in the hands of private and public insurers – a fact of modern life that neither patients nor doctors are particularly happy about). In fact, both of these are languages we all speak. Every lay person knows that gut-wrenching feeling of being faced with a sudden, unexpected expense that throws even the best budgeting projections into a tailspin. Contrarily, no insurance executive, health economist, or NHS official is immune to cataclysmic illness in the family.
And it is within that common ground that a more effective dialogue needs to be opened between the stakeholders: patients, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and the general public whose funds are allocated for these treatments. In a world of limited resources, tough decisions have to be made between pursuing expensive novel treatments for rare diseases and providing routine care for the world’s top killers. The open market has not been particularly apt at doling out these resources to the satisfaction of the masses – as evidenced by the breast cancer patients in Britain and the leukemia patients in India. Creative new solutions are in demand – perhaps giving pharm companies tax breaks for keeping drug prices in the reasonable range, or increasing federal funding for basic research while capping prices on drugs that are produced with such public funds. Whatever the proposed solution, it is imperative that patient advocates take their place at the negotiating table, but equally vital that decisions are made with the limits of real-life economics in mind – economics of production, economics of purchasing, and economics of the relative value of health in rich and poor nations.
In the end, Gleevec is good medicine – even great medicine – though its existence implies some problematic economics. Dr. Druker has become a folk hero among patients whose lives have been given new promise by Gleevec; websites have sprung up dedicated to posting letters of thanks to the man who reinvented hope for a terminal disease. Meanwhile, with the help of Gleevec, Cassie’s stubborn leukemia was forced into remission this spring, but because long-term data on remission in Philadelphia-positive ALL is still lacking, in May she underwent a bone marrow transplant to eradicate any possible remaining pockets of hidden cancer. In June she was declared cancer-free for the first time, but after enduring all the pre-transplant radiation and chemotherapy, she suffered a profound lung injury and has been on life support for endless weeks now, struggling to stay alive while her lungs slowly heal over. The grave consequences of such invasive procedures like bone marrow transplant point to the importance of developing effective and well-tolerated drugs – drugs like Gleevec, Avastin, and Herceptin – that treat the disease while circumventing the heroic but costly interventions that modern medicine employs so commonly. Despite the ongoing struggle for Cassie’s life, for her mommy and daddy and the mesh of family and friends who love their young daughter, any price was worth the cost of Gleevec.
Posted by skylanda.
Childhood leukemia is now a treatable disease. Thirty years ago, she probably would have died after a few months of cutting-edge yet still clumsy treatment. A hundred years ago, before people learned to type and transfuse blood, she would have died within weeks, so anemic that she was. Today, about 85% of childhood ALL cases in kids achieve permanent remission with chemotherapy - a minor miracle of modern pharmaco-chemistry that highlights how the laboratory bench is just as important in medicine as compassion and caring.
But Cassie’s rosy outlook shattered when her cancer was genotyped a week later to discover exactly what had caused the wildfire growth of malignant cells. She turned out to have a rare subtype of ALL – one that placed her squarely in the 15% that don’t beat cancer in the first round. In fact, most kids with her genetic twist don’t beat cancer at all. Cassie had the Philadelphia chromosome.
In 1960 researchers in Pennsylvania began to describe a cancerous white cell in which a piece of the ninth chromosome had switched places with a piece of the twenty-second chromosome. No one understands why this happens, but the protein that is read off one of these abnormal strands is named – in the peculiar parlance of molecular biology – bcr-abl. Bcr-abl belongs to a family of enzymes called tyrosine kinases, which are involved in signalling cells to reproduce. Normally, tyrosine kinases are turned off and on by other enzymes, but the mutant bcr-abl protein locks the cell’s reproductive cycle into the on position, spiralling that cell into self-perpetuating expansion which takes over the marrow with ever-multiplying clones. This so-called 9:22 translocation – the “Philadelphia chromosome”– is the basis for most cases of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), which mainly affects older adults, and also for a small percentage of ALL cases like Cassie’s.
This arcane bit of biochemical mechanistics sat on the shelf for several decades without much clinical importance, but it held out a tantalizing implication: if a cancer is caused by a well-described signalling error, could a drug be invented that inhibits the mutant enzyme alone, gumming up the machinery that causes the malignant transformation without poisoning the body’s normal cells?
This was the burning question Dr. Brian Druker asked in the early 1990s when he began a cooperative project with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant now known as Novartis to test compounds that showed promise in blocking the bcr-abl protein. Modern cancer chemotherapy broadly targets rapidly dividing cells – including both cancerous and normal cells – which is in part why chemo patients lose their hair and battle intractable gastrointestinal problems. Some clinicians quietly mutter that this treatment will one day be regarded the way we now look at bloodletting: as a barbaric and primitive strategy which too often causes more harm to the long-suffering patient for too little gain.
Druker and other visionaries sought to change all that. Using the specific molecular biology of an individual type of cancer cell, narrow-spectrum drugs could be invented that circumvent the scorched-earth tactics of standard chemotherapy. These hypothetical drugs would not be a “magic bullet” for cancer at large; they would be a magic bullet for a particular type or even subtype of cancer. By 2001, a particularly promising tyrosine kinase inhibitor known as imatinib – branded by Novartis under the name Gleevec – set the record for the fastest drug approval ever by the FDA, effectively transforming CML from a fatal disease into a chronic disorder, and giving new hope for patients with Philadelphia-positive ALL.
But this radical advance came at an immense cost, a gamble that pharmaceutical companies make with every compound they consider: the price of developing a drug like Gleevec from start to finish is estimated at up to $800 million. With only about 4500 CML cases (and a handful of Philadelphia-positive ALL cases) annually in America, those R&D costs must be recovered from a small pool of patients, whose insurance – if they have insurance – is billed over $25,000 a year for a patented drug that many patients will take for the rest of their lives. Invoking cash numbers of this scale inevitably raises debate about access and equity in the distribution of vital medicines, and Novartis has hardly escaped this fray. In fact, Novartis has inadvertently positioned itself at the vortex of an economic and ethical storm.
The controversy started when Novartis made the grandiose promise that no patient on the planet who could benefit from Gleevec would go without. Besides several unresolved logistical complications (including the fact that Gleevec was not yet approved in many nations), this promise came with some hefty strings attached. Novartis warned India – one of the world’s largest emerging markets for pharmaceuticals – that the charity would end if the nation allowed any generic knock-offs of Gleevec. In Korea, the government set the prices for Gleevec far below the open market value, and supplies of the drug dwindled while the Novartis and the Korean government bickered over the issue. All over the developing world, Novartis has been accused of using its charitable donations as a strategy to enter a market and then leverage patients into lobbying for governments and private insurers to reimburse for this medication, whose cost far outweighs the average per capita health care spending in many developing nations – sometimes by a factor of ten or even one hundred-fold.
It is tempting to unilaterally condemn Novartis for their exploitation of a vulnerable population, holding leukemia patients hostage to a life-saving drug and demanding a monetary tribute neither they nor their cash-strapped nations can reasonably afford. But without the pharm company’s investment, Gleevec never would have come off the shelf and into patients’ mouths – in fact, it is said that Druker had to gently strong-arm Novartis into investing in the compound at all, because the revenue on such a drug was not projected to bring in sufficient profit. Now Novartis has only a few short years until the patent runs out to recover the initial investment – a chunk of money they put down without a guarantee of any return at all (indeed, most compounds examined by biotech companies never make it out of the test tube, and biotech firms routinely swallow those unrecoverable funds as a cost of doing business). Critics counter that Gleevec would never have existed without the initial research that identified the Philadelphia chromosome - research that Novartis certainly did not fund or compensate anyone for – and that Druker’s work was carried out in a lab supported largely by Oregon Health & Science University, a public medical school in Portland. The fact that Novartis regularly nets over a billion dollars annually on its aggregate drug sales does not lend the company much sympathy from activists either.
In any case, Novartis’ heavy-handed tactics may have already backfired. In January of 2006, the agency that controls patent rights in India ruled that Gleevec is not protected, and half a dozen Indian pharmaceutical makers are now racing into the market to undercut Novartis’ price by up to 90% and effectively end the monopolistic practices allowed by patent rights. This is good news for Indian patients who have sold house and home – even bankrupting themselves – to purchase Gleevec when the promised charitable donations did not come through smoothly. But it may be bad news for sufferers of other diseases that have potential drugs in the pipeline; with patent rights threatened under this precedent, research and development may be hindered by this sharp downward adjustment in projected revenues in the large Indian market.
There is yet a far more fundamental question in the provision of expensive drugs to developing nations: do poor countries really need a fancy new cancer drug? This question addresses what economists call the “opportunity cost” – the list of things you cannot do because you put your money into another activity. One might question what other health assets or advances could be purchased with the $25,000 per patient per year that nations outside India might still have to pay for access to Gleevec. Blowing such a large chunk of public cash on one cancer patient may seem crassly unjust in nations where such money could treat hundreds of tuberculosis, AIDS, or malaria patients – yet that policy is exactly what Novartis is pedalling by exerting pressure on patients to lobby their governments for full reimbursement for Gleevec. On a grander scale, one might ask why a company is spending $800 million on drugs for diseases that affect about 5000 Americans per year when the world is struggling to treat millions of TB patients with drugs that are increasingly inadequate against resistant strains. These questions become even more pressing in light of the fact that novel drugs are now in the pipeline to combat resistance to Gleevec that emerges in many patients on chronic therapy – in effect throwing even more resources into a rare disease that has already merited one miracle drug.
The conflict engendered by pricey drugs is by no means limited to developing nations. In the US, a similar controversy is likely to brew in the coming months over Avastin, which inhibits certain tumors from building the blood vessels needed to feed their growth – at a cost of $100,000 per patient per year, a number which causes patients and insurers alike to balk. Herceptin (a synthethic antibody that marks certain types of breast cancer cells for destruction by the immune system) made headlines in Britain last year when the National Health Service refused to pay the equivalent of $35,000 a year for women in the early stage of the disease to receive the drug. The NHS grounded their decision in the evidence, which had yet to prove any positive effect for women with early cancer, since the drug was largely developed for difficult-to-treat metastatic disease. Moreover, the NHS must control expenditures so that all British citizens can get basic and advanced care without bankrupting the system. The women who challenged the decision argued that with their lives are at stake, any chance of benefit would be worth the cost – and the NHS eventually backed down and agreed to pay for the treatment. The decision was hailed as a landmark advance for patient rights, but by further straining and already-stressed national health system, this victory may help a vocal minority of patients at the expense of other beneficiaries who are less empowered to demand their rights.
It may seem as if these opposing groups – the NHS versus breast cancer patients, pharmaceutical companies versus impoverished leukemia patients – are speaking different languages: one of hard numerical reality and the other of the unquantifiable value of their own lives, with an added subtext of controversy regarding patient autonomy over treatment decisions that are historically left only to doctors (and more recently placed in the hands of private and public insurers – a fact of modern life that neither patients nor doctors are particularly happy about). In fact, both of these are languages we all speak. Every lay person knows that gut-wrenching feeling of being faced with a sudden, unexpected expense that throws even the best budgeting projections into a tailspin. Contrarily, no insurance executive, health economist, or NHS official is immune to cataclysmic illness in the family.
And it is within that common ground that a more effective dialogue needs to be opened between the stakeholders: patients, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and the general public whose funds are allocated for these treatments. In a world of limited resources, tough decisions have to be made between pursuing expensive novel treatments for rare diseases and providing routine care for the world’s top killers. The open market has not been particularly apt at doling out these resources to the satisfaction of the masses – as evidenced by the breast cancer patients in Britain and the leukemia patients in India. Creative new solutions are in demand – perhaps giving pharm companies tax breaks for keeping drug prices in the reasonable range, or increasing federal funding for basic research while capping prices on drugs that are produced with such public funds. Whatever the proposed solution, it is imperative that patient advocates take their place at the negotiating table, but equally vital that decisions are made with the limits of real-life economics in mind – economics of production, economics of purchasing, and economics of the relative value of health in rich and poor nations.
In the end, Gleevec is good medicine – even great medicine – though its existence implies some problematic economics. Dr. Druker has become a folk hero among patients whose lives have been given new promise by Gleevec; websites have sprung up dedicated to posting letters of thanks to the man who reinvented hope for a terminal disease. Meanwhile, with the help of Gleevec, Cassie’s stubborn leukemia was forced into remission this spring, but because long-term data on remission in Philadelphia-positive ALL is still lacking, in May she underwent a bone marrow transplant to eradicate any possible remaining pockets of hidden cancer. In June she was declared cancer-free for the first time, but after enduring all the pre-transplant radiation and chemotherapy, she suffered a profound lung injury and has been on life support for endless weeks now, struggling to stay alive while her lungs slowly heal over. The grave consequences of such invasive procedures like bone marrow transplant point to the importance of developing effective and well-tolerated drugs – drugs like Gleevec, Avastin, and Herceptin – that treat the disease while circumventing the heroic but costly interventions that modern medicine employs so commonly. Despite the ongoing struggle for Cassie’s life, for her mommy and daddy and the mesh of family and friends who love their young daughter, any price was worth the cost of Gleevec.
Posted by skylanda.
Farewell.....
...to Bush's Connecticut lapdog.Three-term Sen.Joe Lieberman fell to anti-war challenger Ned Lamont in Connecticut's Democratic primary Tuesday, the first major election-year test of sentiment over the conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq.Yeah, those were some good times.
"Tonight we voted for big change," a jubilant Lamont told supporters. Unbowed, Lieberman vowed to fight on, announcing plans to run as an independent this fall.
"Of course I am disappointed by the results, but I am not discouraged," Lieberman said. "For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand."
Lamont won with 52 percent of the vote, or 146,061, to 48 percent for Lieberman, with 136,042, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Turnout was projected at twice the norm for a primary.[...]
The Connecticut Senate race dominated the political landscape, and its outcome promises to echo through the fall. The race was watched closely by the liberal, Internet-savvy Democrats who lead the party's emerging "netroots" movement, groups such as Moveon.org that played a big role in pushing Lamont's candidacy.
Critics targeted Lieberman for his strong support for the Iraq war and for his close ties to President Bush. They played and replayed video of the kiss President Bush planted on Lieberman's cheek after the 2005 State of the Union address.[...]
[...]Jubilant Lamont supporters predicted victory in November.In Mckinney and other primary news...
"People are going to look back and say the Bush years started to end in Connecticut," said Avi Green, a volunteer from Boston. "The Republicans are going to look at tonight and realize there's blood in the water."[...]
So what does all of this mean for the Democratic Party and the November elections? Who knows? One can certainly speculate. I sure hope that Lieberman's defeat will send the Democrats a clear message that it's time to grow a back-bone, start seriously opposing Bush and the Republican wingnuts in Congress, and quit selling out their voting base in a pathetic attempt to woo the fundie-social-conservatives, who would probably never vote for them anyway.In Georgia, McKinney, her state's first black congresswoman, lost to Hank Johnson, the black former commissioner of DeKalb County, 58 percent to 41 percent.
In the heavily Democratic district, the runoff winner is likely to win in the fall.
McKinney has long been controversial, once suggesting the Bush administration had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Her comments helped galvanize opposition and she lost her seat in 2002, but won it again two years ago.
In her latest brouhaha in March, she struck a Capitol Police officer who did not recognize her and tried to stop her from entering a House office building.
A grand jury in Washington declined to indict her, but she was forced to apologize before the House. She drew less than 50 percent of the vote in last month's primary.
In other primaries Tuesday:
• In Michigan, Republican Rep. Joe Schwarz, a moderate who supports abortion rights, lost to conservative Tim Walberg, a former state lawmaker. The race drew more than $1 million from outside groups; Schwarz has received support from President Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain.
• In Colorado, two open congressional seats have drawn crowds of candidates.
• Missouri Republican Sen. Jim Talent and Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill, the state auditor, won their party's primaries.
(***Graphic via Pandagon and originally BushSpeaks.com)
--Posted by Pseudo-Adrienne
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
My Summer Vacation
Takes place from tomorrow morning and lasts exactly one week. So you will be free of me for glorious seven days. But have no fear, this blog will not be there like a silent reminder of a once-lovely relationship. No. I have some wonderful guest bloggers all lined up for you. Well, more or less lined up, except for a few stragglers.
Let me introduce them to you. Tarampampam! (that's the sound of trumpets):
Blue lily, coturnix, pseudoadrienne and skylanda. And if I can sort out the paperwork in time, also hybrid0 and olvlzl.
My heartfelt thanks to all the guest bloggers.
For Your Information
I wrote a longish post of advice on how mainstream journalists might cover the liberal and progressive blogs. It's on Eschaton.
IOKIYAR
It's OK if you are a Republican, especially if you are called Ann Coulter. What is OK? Well, misusing sources in a book might be. Using information from the 1970s to argue about liberal evil-doings today. Or implying that liberal experts are advocating teaching kindergarteners about fisting based on a source which discussed the sex education of Dartmouth college students twenty years ago:
. On Page 175, Coulter attacked "liberals" who would "foist" sex education topics such as "[a]nal sex, oral sex, fisting, dental dams, [and] 'birthing games'" on kindergarteners. Citing a November 8, 1987, New York Times article, Coulter wrote:
But in contrast to liberal preachiness about IQ, there would be no moralizing when it came to sex. Anal sex, oral sex, fisting, dental dams, "birthing games" -- all that would be foisted on unsuspecting children in order to protect kindergarteners from the scourge of AIDS. As one heroine of the sex education movement told an approving New York Times reporter, "My job is not to teach one right value system. Parents and churches teach moral values. My job is to say, 'These are the facts,' and to help the students, as adults, decide what is right for them."9
To those who find it odd that Coulter would support her claim about "fisting" being taught to kindergarteners by quoting "one heroine of the sex education movement" and referring to students as "adults," there is a very good reason for that. The woman Coulter quoted was Dr. Beverlie Conant Sloane, then-director of health education at Dartmouth College. The Times article cited by Coulter, titled "At Dartmouth, A Helping Candor," (subscription required) was about the sex education programs available to adult students at Dartmouth -- not children in kindergarten. Not only is the article about adult students, but it is from November 1987, close to 20 years old -- hardly what would be considered to be relevant information on current sex education policies.
Does talking about this matter? Am I just giving Coulter more attention than she deserves? You decide, as the Fox News might say. But the fact of the matter is (see how I'm falling into a wingnutty way of writing here?) that I have read many comments from people who believe that Coulter makes sense, under all that cruelty and ridicule that she wields so masterfully/mistressfully, and this means that it's worthwhile to point out when she doesn't make any sense at all.
Then there is the old, pathetic reason about trying to write without distorting everything, and we really shouldn't let it be ok to distort if you are a Republican.
Landlords and Sexual Harassment
A diary on Kos discusses this issue:
I am an ex-fair housing lawyer who prosecuted several civil sexual harassment cases for the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, on behalf of aggrieved women. (I also co-wrote the article that Cyrus cited at the beginning of this diary.)
I want everyone to know that sexual harassment in housing happens a LOT. There aren't any good statistics out there, but I know from my experience on these cases that we were barely scratching the surface. Some observations, again just from my own experience and that of my colleagues: Housing harassment is not usually an isolated phenomenon...
[snip]
but rather a situation where the landlord makes it his standard operating procedure to rent to and harass vulnerable women.
Most of the time, there are multiple victims in each case. (The smallest number of victims I ever had was 7, the most was 21. I think one of my colleagues had a case with 24.)
While I have read about cases of landlords who harass middle-class tenants, the usual targets are low-income women with children. All but one of my cases involved women who qualified for public or subsidized housing. (The exception, horribly enough, was a trailer park outside of a military base, where wives of men who were in Iraq were being harassed by their landlord. A few of the women couldn't move because there was not enough base housing for families, and the other trailer parks in the area were full.) In fact, some of the women in my cases were IN Section 8 housing when they were harassed. That's right -- their landlord was receiving taxpayer dollars for the pleasure of harassing them.
...
One poster was correct in making a point about criminal liability. A lot of the conduct we would see was clearly criminal -- sexual battery, home invasion, forcible rape. The problem is that few tenants were willing to report this sort of thing to police, because they feared (probably accurately) that the police would take no action. Again, from my experience, and that of my colleagues: The landlord is invariably of a higher social status. He owns property (by definition), he is usually white, is usually in his 50s, 60s, or 70s (my office had more than one harasser try to use the "Viagra defense"). The victim is often black, very poor, and under 30. Some of the victims in my cases have had criminal records, substance abuse problems, or mental health issues, making them even more vulnerable. The very vulnerability that makes them fair game for the landlord also makes it less likely that they will feel like they can call the police, and that the police will believe them. (One woman in a case I had called the police to report that her landlord was threatening to evict her unless she had oral sex with him. The police arrested HER when they discovered she had an outstanding traffic warrant. The landlord, meanwhile, persuaded the cops that she was just a bad tenant who was trying to get even with him for attempting to evict her. Guess what happened? He evicted her.)
This is a problem that has probably been underreported, at least compared to the sexual harassment at work, but it has similar roots: One participant has more power than the other and thinks that this power can be used to extort sexual services of some kind, while the other participant is at least partially locked into the bad situation; partially locked, because finding a new job or apartment is hard, time-consuming and involves real costs and losses. In the examples the Kos diary quoted the power imbalance is even greater as the tenants don't have the money to rent an open market apartment.
We need more study and discussion of this.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Meanwhile, in Ohio
All U.S. politics wonks are right now focused on the Connecticut Democratic primary where Ned Lamont is challenging Joe Lieberman for his Senate seat. But politics is happening everywhere, and in Ohio some recent events are worrisome:
For Tony Minor, the pastor of the Community of Faith Assembly in a run-down section of East Cleveland, Ohio's new voter registration rules have meant spending two extra hours a day collecting half as many registration cards from new voters as he did in past years.
Republicans say the new rules are needed to prevent fraud, but Democrats say they are making it much harder to register the poor.
In the last year, six states have passed such restrictions, and in three states, including Ohio, civic groups have filed lawsuits, arguing that the rules disproportionately affect poor neighborhoods.
But nowhere have the rules been as fiercely debated as here, partly because they are being administered by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the secretary of state and the Republican candidate in one of the most closely watched governor's races in the country, a contest that will be affected by the voter registration rules. Mr. Blackwell did not write the law, but he has been accused of imposing regulations that are more restrictive than was intended.
Under the law, passed by the Republican-led state legislature in January 2006, paid voter registration workers must personally submit the voter registration cards to the state, rather than allow the organizations overseeing the drives to vet and submit them in bulk.
By requiring paid canvassers to sign and put their addresses on the voter registration cards they collect, and by making them criminally liable for any irregularities on the cards, the rules have made it more difficult to use such workers, who most often work in lower-income and Democratic-leaning neighborhoods, where volunteers are scarce.
So if a canvasser is paid he or she must personally take all the registration cards in and must also sign for them, and she or he becomes criminally liable, too. As far as I can tell the same regulations do not apply to volunteer canvassers:
"Quit whining," said the Rev. Russell Johnson, the pastor of Fairfield Christian Church, who chuckled while shaking his head. "We work with the same challenges that everyone else does and we're not having trouble."
Surrounded by cornfields and middle-income homes, Mr. Johnson's 4,000-member evangelical church in Lancaster, Ohio, is part of a coalition of conservative groups that aims to sign up 200,000 new voters by November, he said.
In the past several elections, Republicans have been effective in registering voters and getting them to the polls. Mr. Johnson said conservatives were better able to depend on voter registration volunteers because the conservatives had a message that attracted people who were willing to work free.
This whole thing reminds me of the favorite strategy of the pro-life state governments, which is to saddle all reproductive health care clinics with so many legal requirements that they can't possibly satisfy them all and then will be closed down.
Housekeeping News
I'm guest blogging on Eschaton until Wednesday night. And then I'm going to go on vacation for one week. A later post will introduce the guest bloggers who kindly agreed to take care of this blog while I'm gone.
All those musical chairs. And no money is changing hands! Isn't the blogosphere wonderful?
Now I'm going to write something proper for this blog.
Framing Issues
Froomkin's latest column quotes Bush and some others from his administration on the proposed Israel-Hezbullah resolution:
Responding to specific questions about the resolution and the conflict, Bush tirelessly dipped into his small store of stock answers, repeatedly extolling the universal appeal of liberty and asserting the importance of addressing the "root cause" of the violence -- terrorists in general, Hezbollah in particular -- as part of "the great challenge of the 21st century."
A Trap?
In their press briefings yesterday, Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley not coincidentally used the exact same phrase to describe what they expect will happen after the resolution is approved: "We'll see who is for peace and who isn't."
Of course, if you believe Lebanese officials, that's because the resolution is a trap.
Note all the framing issues in that short quote? Talking about "root cause" without actually saying anything about it, mentioning "the great challenge", without actually telling how we are going to face it. He's punching emotional buttons without adding any new information at all.
But the "We'll see who is for peace and who isn't" piece is new and very clever. The framing reduces the available options to two: Either you accept the U.S. view and are for peace, or you are not for peace. No other options exist.
This is how issues are framed by the Bush administration, and in a short while we are all talking about people "being for peace or not", as if the verity of the framing was in no doubt at all.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Sunday Night Dog Blogging
Thanks to saoba, in my comments, who saved the weekend from being dogless.
The New Gender Divide at the New York Times
This is a series which is advertised as follows:
Articles in this series are examining what has happened to men and women several decades after the women's movement began.
That is a wishy-washy way of explaining these events as a consequence of the women's movement, I'd wager. And so far the following articles have appeared in the series:
Previous Articles in the Series:
Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job (July 31, 2006)
Small Colleges, Short of Men, Embrace Football (July 10, 2006)
At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust (July 9, 2006)
David Brooks and John Tierney couldn't be any happier! See what feminism has wrought! Men in the dust!
It's always possible that the series first looks at all the horrible things that have happened to men (whether they actually have happened in any sense of trends is another thing altogether), and that the later articles talk about all the good things that feminism has done, for both women and men, mind you. But if so, this part of series hasn't started yet. Today's piece is entitled:"Facing Middle Age With No Degree, and No Wife".
This is another of those trend-manufacturing stories that the Times seems to specialize in.
Week in Pictures
From Jesus' General. I found the funeral pictures immensely moving. We should make a law that those who send people to die in wars must go to their funerals.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Snake-Mart
That's what this blog isn't. It's not Target, either, even with the French spelling. It's a little general store in the mythical wild west, though it also specializes in feminist articles for wear.
And that's where the problem lies. Progress will wipe it out. I'm shit in the advertizing and marketing departments, and my sincerity and simple pricing schemes will not suffice. If I only could offer coffee and chocolate ice-creams for all comers! But it's all make-belief, until the InterTubes actually work to bring stuff to your mouths.
(Yes, I'm in need of a vacation, and will take a short one next week. Recently I've had trouble remembering the English terms for simple concepts. Let's hope that my guest bloggers are free to take up the store minding tasks.)
But in the advertising department: My travels in Wingnuttia are going as planned and two of the three instalments are out and available for no-money down. The last one, on the shallowness of the American culture and the various ways we react to that, is still mostly in the back of my head.
And this is the problem with one-goddess grocery stores. A great article still lies unmade on my workshop floor, on David Brooks's recent silly column and the other pieces that responded to it, and I may never get to it even though it seems absolutely urgent that I do. And there has been no dog blogging this weekend. If you have a cute picture, send it over, please.
---
Later: I should really erase this post. Whining is not pretty, and I have no reason for it. This blog is doing better all the time in terms of the various indicators. I'm just a melancholic kind of goddess, always finding something wrong with everything, even success, and in particular with success. So it goes.
The Sound of One Domino Falling
This is the headline of an editorial in the New York Times about Donald Rumsfeld. Those of you who follow these things know that Rummy got ticked off by Hillary Clinton and that the generals with him told us the obvious news about Iraq: that it's falling into a civil war, that violence in Baghdad is as bad as it has been since the occupation began. -- This on the same day that several hundred thousand young men marched for Hezbullah there, shouting "Death to Israel! Death to America!"
And what does Rumsfeld tell us? This:
"If we left Iraq prematurely," he said, "the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they'd order us and all those who don't share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines." And finally, he intoned, America will be forced "to make a stand nearer home."
And this:
As for Mr. Rumsfeld, he suggested that lawmakers just leave everything up to him and the military command and stop talking about leaving Iraq. "We should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy," he said.
What is the sound of one Rumsfeld in the woods, if no-one hears him? Now that's a koan.
The Sperm Wars
Not that they exist, but then it's fashionable these days to declare wars against concepts which can't fight back. Like "war on terror". Bush can't do anything about my terror when facing a dentist's chair. The "war on drugs" is a similar stupid term. Wouldn't the best way to fight drugs be to destroy them, by, for example, consuming them? -- This is all linguistic bullshit, but I'm joining in because I need a vacation.
So back to the sperm wars. I got the idea from a funny blog post at the English Guardian website, on the question whether men will be eradicated now that we can clone sperm from mice. Not that mouse sperm will work on humans, but the writer suffered from a more existential angst:
What interested us much more, though, was the response, in various newspapers and broadcasts, to the news of this research. The response, essentially, was the question "Will this make men redundant?" In other words, when the technology develops to the extent that it can be used on humans, will a significant number of women want to be fertilised without using sperm that has been acquired by the old-school method?
And, if they do, how will this make men feel?
Pretty bad, was my initial feeling.
After all, biologically speaking, a man is two things. He is, first, a sperm-making factory, and, second, a sperm-shooting machine. So it would not be surprising if, on some level, men felt put out - a little emasculated, even - by the "artificial" sperm production technique. Soon, if you want sperm, you will be able to get it without going to the traditional sperm factory. You might say that, for men, this is rather like owning a cotton plantation, and reading about the discovery of nylon.
It's funny. But weird. Then the piece gets even weirder. To get the idea, you need to know that the setup is two guys talking about all this stuff:
Cloned sperm, of course, is a different matter. One day, some time in the near future, the scientists might get it right. And then what? Since the dawn of time, men have always known that, whatever they do, however badly they behave, they are still the only place to go if you want sperm.
Well, possibly not for much longer. Won't this affect us, somewhere deep inside our brains?
Maybe a little bit, we decided. And then we tried to imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed. If scientists discovered a way of cloning eggs from stem cells, would men even consider the possibility of doing without women? Would newspaper articles trumpet the possible redundancy of the female half of the species?
"Never," I said. "Men would never want to get rid of women."
"Yes, but that's not to say they feel the same way about us."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, look at how we revere women and their eggs. And compare that with how sperm is depicted."
This is where I lost it, possibly because I can't remember the last time I passed a temple for the egg worshippers. Indeed, the main religions don't even need an ovary to create the world these days. It all comes from a Father, or at most from a Father and a Son, with a little bit of holy ghost thrown in. No women at all there. So what's the reverence of women and their eggs all about? The rest of the post doesn't tell us. It never goes back to this argument that eggs are more revered than sperm; it just goes on to make fun of the poor sperm. We are supposed to see the whole thing as a parable about men (the poor sperm) and women (the worshipped eggs).
And that charming statement earlier on, the one about how men would never want to get rid of women, even if uterine replicators were readily available. There are some feminists, fairly radical ones, who believe that men would like nothing as well as getting rid of women, provided that some robot class is invented to care for children and to do laundry and simple, uncreative cooking. There's even a pretty famous science-fiction short story about the final killing of all women. -- Not that most men would want to do this, or even the majority of men, but it's important to set the charming statement into some perspective here.
Additional perspective can be obtained from all those countries which have strict laws about the places where women can exist and the places where they can't exist. Which really is a partial eradication of women if you think about it.
Friday, August 04, 2006
For the Want of A Nail
The war was lost, as the old story goes, because the nail fell out of the horseshoe, which caused the horse to go lame, which in turn made riding the horse impossible, which stopped the king from participating in the fighting, which made his soldiers discouraged and then the enemy won. I've made up some of that but you get the point.
This point matters today, because the U.S. military is running out of people:
The Defense Department quietly asked Congress on Monday to raise the maximum age for military recruits to 42 for all branches of the service.
Neat. We could have mother-and-son teams in Iraq. But this is not the reason for the higher maximum age, and neither is the wonderfulness of the new more mature recruits. No, it's the want-of-a-nail kind of thing. We don't have enough cannon fodder. Just think of this:
Last week the Pentagon increased the number of US soldiers in Iraq to around 130,000 by extending the tours of some 3,700 combat troops by an extra 120 days to help quell the sectarian violence in Baghdad.
It's like recycling. The same soldiers keep going tour after tour. This can't be mentally healthy. Hence the attempt to somehow attract more recruits.
Now that I think about it my initial example is terrible. But it will stay, because I'm too tired to rewrite anything today. So how can I save this post from total idiocy? Perhaps by pointing out that this personnel shortage might stop Bush from invading Iran or attacking Syria or helping Cuba get a leg up on capitalism or whatever brilliantly scary plans he might be hatching. And his inability to follow up on these plans might save the world from armageddon.
There is just one snag in that beautiful chain of logic, and that is bombs. They can be launched with a military force consisting of just a few old men, say, and armageddon is still practical. This is pretty much what an article in The National Review urges:
Our U.N. representative, John Bolton, is an admirable man and an outstanding spokesman for America, but his masters in the Oval Office and the State department have saddled him with an impossible job. Diplomacy before a war can sometimes provide an honorable alternative. "Diplomacy" in the midst of a war we are losing by failing to confront our main enemy is a euphemism for appeasement — a dead end road. The more eager our president is to rely on "the international community," the U.N., and our EU "partners," and to avoid, at all costs, any military confrontation with Iran, the more confident of ultimate victory the mullahs become. To them, and to hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, watching Al Jazeera or its like on their TV screens, it looks like Iran is winning one glorious Islamist victory after another, striking blow after paralyzing blow at the once-mighty giant of the Christian West, while we cower in fear, afraid to strike back. We look like losers, while Iran looks invincible, and that image of invincibility is the most effective weapon Iran has in its hugely successful battle for the allegiance of the Muslim masses everywhere. Most Americans are still unaware of Iran's promise to light up the skies with a great surprise on August 22, but Muslims everywhere are keenly aware of it; most await the day with growing excitement.
We should not wait, passively, for the Iranians to unveil their surprise. We should light up the skies with our own surprise: a massive aerial bombardment that wipes out most of Iran's nuclear facilities, and decimates the ranks of its mullahs as well as those of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij forces that keep them in power, defeating these monsters and decimating their fan base by shattering their image of invincibility. Retired air force Lt. General Tom McInerney already has a plan to wipe out most of Iran's nuclear facilities from the air. As I've argued , we should augment it with additional targets and let fly, as soon as possible, with no forewarning, for maximum effect. Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, one of the few who argues in public for a similarly bold course sums it up this way:
By waiting for a first strike we are put in a position of playing a retaliation game after we have already endured unacceptable losses in population and perception. Once America and Israel are seen as weak enough to defeat, then the international jackals will all join in for the kill. This is what our enemies hope to accomplish…We face a crisis of major proportions. Hesitation may be fatal.
He's right. The time to act is now.
It's not a loose nail that bothers the writer of this piece, it's a loose screw. For consider what would happen right after all those bombs have fallen. Does she expect the millions and millions of Iranians not to react to such an attack? Or does she expect flowers from the children and a statue for Bush in the middle of Teheran?
No, the Iranians would fight back. And we're out of soldiers, pretty much. Though it's not a bad plan for armageddon if you want one so urgently.
An Odd Lieberman Poll
Concerning the Connecticut Democratic primary in which Ned Lamont is challenging Joe Lieberman for his senatorial seat:
Latest polls in Connecticut show that Lieberman now trails his opponent, Ned Lamont, who has charged that the senator is too close to the Bush administration on several issues, most notably the Iraq war.
The latest Gallup poll finds that among Republicans and Republican "leaners," 46% view Lieberman favorably, while 27% view him unfavorably. Democrats are more evenly divided in their attitudes, with 38% viewing him favorably and 32% unfavorably. Currently, his support among Republicans is on the upswing. However, this is from a national sample and may not suggest a likely outcome next Tuesday.
So the current Democratic Senator from Connecticut gets higher favorability ratings from the Republicans than from the people in his own party. This is funny, though Joe has always had many Republican friends. Sean Hannity, for example.
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