Category: Everything Else

Let’s say you built a building, got it inspected and a certificate of occupancy issued, and then the roof caved in. You sue your builder. Then the twist – the local government files an amicus brief on behalf of the builder. Their claim? The building was issued a certificate of occupancy, so suing the builder undermines the credibility of the government.

It would be funny except that the feds are doing the same thing right now with the FDA. And in at least one case they’ve won. By way of the NY Times:

The Bush administration has been going to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they have been injured by prescription drugs and medical devices.

The administration contends that consumers cannot recover damages for such injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In court papers, the Justice Department acknowledges that this position reflects a “change in governmental policy,” and it has persuaded some judges to accept its arguments, most recently scoring a victory in the federal appeals court in Philadelphia.

Allowing consumers to sue manufacturers would “undermine public health” and interfere with federal regulation of drugs and devices, by encouraging “lay judges and juries to second-guess” experts at the F.D.A.

As if no product has ever been FDA approved and then later been found to have serious problems and been pulled off the market (the FDA’s own website even has a page about this issue). But even more than that, it’s the idea that the government is right and people are wrong that bugs me.

Seems like good news to me at least:

Israel’s Defense Ministry has mapped out a new route for the separation barrier in the West Bank that heeds a Supreme Court order to reduce hardships for Palestinians and runs closer to the Israel’s 1967 border

As with all things in Israel, the Devil is in the details. But at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Good op-ed from Richard Clarke about the 9/11 commission report (yes I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about it) and how to make its recommendations even better. Key points below:

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies – especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.

The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don’t suffer the “failures of imagination” that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.’s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the “groupthink” that hampered the agency’s ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department – a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.

I saw the report in a bookstore on Friday night but I can’t bring myself to buy it. It’s like books about the Holocaust – too painful for me to want to read them.

Orcinus has a lengthy comparison of attitudes today towards Arabs with attitudes towards Japanese in the 1940s – worth a look. If you replace the word “Arab” with the word “Jap” in the materials he presents, it’s hard to tell what was written when.

Bottom line?

The reality, just as it was in 1942, is that focusing on a single race as “the enemy” is not only wrong-headed and grotesquely unjust, it’s amazingly ineffective. The United States wasted a large portion of its wartime food production by incarcerating Japanese farmers, devoted millions of taxpayer dollars to rounding them up and incarcerating them, and eventually paid billions more in reparations for having done so.

More to the point, the reality is this: It’s extremely, extremely unlikely that you will witness real terrorists in action, whether merely “warming up” or actually carrying out a plot. Suspecting someone merely because they are a different color or are acting in a way you think is unusual is almost certainly a leap of logic based in prejudice and false stereotypes.

You can’t (yet) outsource the person who actually hands the order to the customer, but you can outsource at least some fast-food jobs. The latest application of technology:

Pull off U.S. Interstate Highway 55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald’s next to the highway and you’ll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant – or even in Missouri.

The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines.

At least the call center is is Colorado, not Hyderabad.

Tip of the hat to The Left Coaster for the link.

So Linda Ronstadt got in trouble with the casino who hired her for dedicating a song to Michael Moore. I think that’s pretty lame, frankly. I also think it’s lame that nothing was done about the audience members who reportedly

tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air.

Michael Moore has weighed in on the issue here – offering a personal appearance and a free screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 as a way for the Aladdin casino to make it up to the American public. Think what you want of Moore, but he is an excellent publicist.

I’m kind of annoyed by the whole thing and decided to make a gesture. I went over to iTunes and bought a copy of the song ‘Desperado‘ that was at the core of the whole mess. I know it’s a somewhat meaningless gesture, but it was fun picking which version of the song to buy – there’s at least a dozen of them aside from the Eagles’ original version and Ronstadt’s cover of it.