I’m talking about this $170 billion foray into space. After all, the next generation will be paying for a collapsed social security system, a bankrupted Medicare program, soaring interest on the public debt, as well as coughing up far higher taxes to keep some semblance of a government in operation. But, hey, the president needed another major distraction the week before the Iowa caucuses, and since he won’t be around to pick up the bill, why the hell not? Deficits don’t matter, after all. And what’s a few hundred billion dollars over the next few decades anyway? Chickenfeed for the big and bigger government now championed by the Republicans. This space initiative is, for me, the last fiscal straw. There comes a point at which the excuses for fiscal recklessness run out. The president campaigned in favor of the responsibility ethic. He has governed – in terms of guarding the nation’s finances – according to the motto: “If it feels good, do it.” I give up. Can’t they even pretend to give a damn?
WATCH JOSH SPIN: I can’t do any better than the original, so just take a look at Josh Marshall’s attempt to distinguish between good “unilateralism” under Clinton and bad “unilateralism” under Bush. Sometimes, Marshall’s rabid partisanship gets the better of his intellectual honesty. It’s just that he’s usually better at disguising it.
SLIMING DEAN: What a vile little smear story from ABC News. I knew this campaign was getting tough, but this kind of irrelevant piece of guilt by association is truly beneath contempt.
REAL PRICE GOUGING: I’m a big defender of the pharmaceutical companies and the incredible difference they have made for people with serious disease. But sometimes, they are indefensible. Check out this account of what Abbott Pharmaceuticals has been doing with the pricing of their anti-HIV protease inhibitor. After seven years on the market, they have suddenly increased its price by 400 percent. Why? Because it’s too toxic in the levels used when it came on the market (trust me; I took it when it first came out; it was crippling – liver stress, constant nausea, numbness of the face, neuropathy in my hands and feet, a mandatory two hour nap in the middle of the day, etc, etc.). So the amount now used is less than a tenth of the original dose – and often in combination with other drugs (which it helps metabolize). Abbott’s response? Quadruple the price overnight. If the drug industry wants to avoid being clobbered in this climate, they’d be smart not to engage in what amounts to sheer gouging.
DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “It is the same as saying the federal government doesn’t want to weigh in on slavery, but if the states want to call it chattel that is O.K.,” – Sandy Rios, Concerned Women of America, comparing allowing gay couples to get married to the evil of slavery. If the NYT piece is accurate, it’s revealing, I think, that the far right cares much less about supporting heterosexual marriage than in preventing gay unions. Revealing, but to anyone who follows them closely, utterly unsurprising.
The Dish 