Picking up on a comment by nova, here’s a link to a website where you can design your own electoral map. Then you can copy the URL into your comment for everyone else to see. Overall vote percentages, including minor party candidates, can be used as a tiebreaker.
If someone finds a better site to link, please add it into this post (or replace my link above).
Filed under: 2012, Obama | Tagged: Romney | 17 Comments »
I was reading Frum this morning and found a link to Tom Ricks’ list of nominees for worst general in American history. Here’s his list:
1. Douglas MacArthur
2. Benedict Arnold
3. Ned Almond
4. Tommy R. Franks
5. William Westmoreland
6. George McClellan
7. Ambrose Burnside
8. Horatio Gates
So, what do you all think? Any other nominees? I think Custer, Mark Clark, Rosecrans, Bragg, and maybe Fredenall deserve mention. But I can’t argue with the top slot coming from one of Ricks’ 8 nominees.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Leadership, Military | 19 Comments »
A post by Eugene Volokh on VC talks about a recent jury award under the CA public accommodations anti-discrimination statute against a (Muslim) hotel owner that kicked out a Friends of the IDF gathering. I think the major issue is whether property owners are free to discriminate on the basis of non-religious (or religious) beliefs. A secondary issue is whether property owners can discriminate on the basis of speech (Note: it is not clear to me whether the Friends of the IDF gathering was just a party or a fundraiser with speeches, etc.).
The link to the LA Times article has a little more information on the background.
So, an additional question is: should we have different rules for property owners in different states? Volokh makes it sound as if this result is specific to CA.
Filed under: First Amendment, law | 50 Comments »
Just a couple of quick links from the NEJM about electronic medical records and the difficulty doctors are having with implementation. Perhaps NoVA can help out and give a his perspective as well.
Even as consumer IT — word-processing programs, search engines, social networks, e-mail systems, mobile phones and apps, music players, gaming platforms — has become deeply integrated into the fabric of modern life, physicians find themselves locked into pre–Internet-era electronic health records (EHRs) that aspire to provide complete and specialized environments for diverse tasks. The federal push for health IT, spearheaded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), establishes an information backbone for accountable care, patient safety, and health care reform. But we now need to take the next step: fitting EHRs into a dynamic, state-of-the-art, rapidly evolving information infrastructure — rather than jamming all health care processes and workflows into constrained EHR operating environments.
Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT
Debates about the productivity yield of IT are new to health care but not to other sectors of the economy. During the 1970s and 1980s, the computing capacity of the U.S. economy increased more than a hundredfold while the rate of productivity growth fell dramatically to less than half the rate of the preceding 25 years.1 The relationship between the rapid increase in IT use and the simultaneous slowdown in productivity became widely known as the “IT productivity paradox,” and economists debated whether investing billions of dollars in IT was worthwhile. The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow observed in 1987 that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
That earlier IT debate and its resolution carry important messages for today’s health IT debate. Solow’s famous observation launched more than two decades of research on IT’s effect on productivity, and that research revealed numerous explanations for the paradox — as well as evidence that earlier conclusions about the relationship between IT and productivity were incorrect and that under the right conditions, IT could indeed yield significant productivity gains.
Unraveling the IT Productivity Paradox — Lessons for Health Care
Filed under: healthcare | 38 Comments »
Somewhat related to both the discussions of economics and evolution is the work of Elinor Ostrom, who passed away yesterday. Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. She was a political scientist who worked on the “tragedy of the commons” and collective action.
The WSJ announcement.
Ostrom’s Nobel page.
Commentary by Ilya Somin at VC.
A post by the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, whose work I think I’ve referenced here before.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Jeffery Toobin has an article in the New Yorker about the behind-the-scenes action in Citizens United. It’s long, so I haven’t had the chance to read it in its entirety, but here’s a “review” from Jonathan Adler at VC. The first graf:
The latest New Yorker has an extensive excerpt of Jeffrey Toobin’s forthcoming book, The Oath: The Obama White House vs. the Supreme Court, focusing on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. The story, “Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision,” is everything you’d expect from a Toobin piece. It’s engaging and informative, with exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting of how the decision came to be. This stuff is catnip for court watchers. Yet the article also contains plenty of subtle (and not-so-subtle) spin in service of Toobin’s broader narrative of an out-of-control conservative court. As a consequence, Toobin paints a somewhat misleading picture of the case and the Court.
Filed under: Constitution, Supreme Court | Tagged: campaign finance, Citizens United | 50 Comments »
Something I’ve been keeping an eye on is the effects of the SCOTUS ruling in PLIVA v. Mensing, limiting liability of generic drug makers for side effects of the drug that are not included on the warning label from the brand-name drugs.
A couple of links.
First:
In the wake of Mensing, state courts in Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey have been considering what to do with thousands of suits by metoclopramide users who claim they weren’t warned about the long-term risks of developing a neurological disorder. (The cases were mostly filed in state courts after the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation denied a bid to consolidate the metoclopramide litigation at a federal level.) What’s notable is that judges in those states have taken markedly different approaches to their metoclopramide dockets: In Philadelphia and San Francisco, judges have allowed thousands of personal-injury suits against the generics to move forward despite Mensing. But on Friday Superior Court Judge Carol Higbee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, ruled that generics are largely off the hook in her court.
Alison Frankel at Thomson Reuters. In addition to the Higbee decision, there was another case in NJ (in re Fosamax)
A likely case for eventual SCOTUS review, to reconcile the decisions in PLIVA v. Mensing and Wyeth v. Levine, which provided for damages to plaintiffs who suffered side effects from brand-name drugs.
On Wednesday, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld a $21 million verdict awarded to a woman who suffered grievous injuries as a result of taking a generic pain medication prescribed by her doctor. In its appeal to the First Circuit, the generic drug manufacturer, Mutual Pharmaceutical Company, argued that the design defect claims were preempted by the Hatch-Waxman Amendments to the Federal, Drug, and Cosmestic Act (“FDCA”) under the Supreme Court’s 2011 decision PLIVA v. Mensing.
A NYT article about people suffering from side effects of the generics. Included in the article is a mention of a Public Citizen petition of the FDA to allow generics to use the Changes Being Effected process to change their warning labels. The FDA has apparently postponed their decision on this petition.
And Sen. Leahy has introduced a bill to address the PLIVA/Levine discrepancy. The bill is here with its House counterpart, introduced by Rep. Van Hollen here.
Filed under: regulations, Supreme Court | Tagged: generics, pharmaceutical, PLIVA | 25 Comments »
An interesting case was argued at SCOTUS yesterday:
[I]n Christopher v. SmithKline Beecham Corp[, t]he Justices will decide, once and for all, whether pharmaceutical sales representatives (PSRs) are “outside salesmen” and thus exempted from overtime-pay requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) The decision will also settle a circuit split between the Second and Ninth Circuits: the former held that PSRs are not outside salesmen and thus are not exempted from the FLSA’s requirement that they be paid overtime wages, while the Ninth Circuit (in this case) unanimously reached the contrary conclusion. This will be an interesting case with wide-ranging ramifications for the pharmaceutical industry and the ninety thousand people nationwide employed as PSRs.
Christopher v. SmithKline Beecham Corp
Also, the en banc Ninth Circuit decided the AZ voter ID case:
We uphold Proposition 200’s requirement that voters show identification at the polling place, but conclude that the NVRA supersedes Proposition 200’s registration provision as that provision is applied to applicants using the National Mail Voter Registration Form (the “Federal Form”) to register to vote in federal elections. [NVRA = National Voter Registration Act — ed.]
Filed under: Supreme Court | 3 Comments »
I promised Mark I’d post some thoughts on Florence v. Board of Freeholders, the recent 4th Amendment case from SCOTUS. Since this post isn’t a scholarly document, I’m not going to provide extensive references or links. My sources are the opinions from the various cases, which can be found at various sites on the web.
First, a brief summary of the case from Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog:
Insisting that it has no expertise in how to run a jail or prison, the Supreme Court divided 5-4 Monday in ruling that every person arrested and held temporarily can be subjected to a routine strip search, so long as it involves only a visual inspection without touching or abusive gestures. The prisoner, however, may be told to manipulate some part of the body. Some difference of emphasis among the five Justices in the majority made it appear that the decision might be more limited than at first glance.
The ruling, it appeared, did not authorize jail officials to conduct a strip search unless the prisoner was to be placed among other prisoners at the facility. Two Justices wrote separately in an effort to stress that aspect of the ruling, and their votes were essential to the 5-4 result.
The decision was a clear defeat for challengers to strip searches as a general policy. The Court explicitly refused to limit the authority to use strip searches only to situations in which a specific individual gave officers a reason to consider that prisoner to be dangerous or likely to be carrying a concealed weapon or drugs. The same kind of visual inspection of an arrestee’s naked body, the Court declared, can be applied to anyone placed in the general population of a jail or prison, even if only temporarily.
If you’re still interested, then there is more below.
Filed under: Supreme Court | Tagged: 4th Amendment | 5 Comments »
Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojkt
All Things in Moderation 