Author: Andrew Sullivan

Dayton, Ohio, 12 pm

A reader writes:

As a budding scientist who has been involved in the HIV field, it is rather frustrating to see media reports of the latest breakthrough in research without a full understanding of the findings and their significance (not that the medical establishment is not complicit … we put out these press releases in order to justify continued research money).  As you are well aware, the field had been fraught with repeated false hopes and, after more than two decades of trying, we are no closer to a preventative vaccine than when we first started.

These findings today do not really change this fact.  The same group has previously described another such neutralizing antibody but have been unsuccessful in their attempts to elicit this response in other individuals (this is the premise of a vaccine).  The very fact that the vast majority of people fail to mount a significant immune response against the virus (unlike we do to most other pathogens) suggests that a vaccine may not even be possible in the first place.  Pharmaceutical therapy, for better or worse, will remain our best response to this disease for the foreseeable future. 

That being said, without any signs of the disease abating, research like this cannot be discounted.  Just don’t expect results any time soon.

I don't. The Dish has long been dismissive of the search for a vaccine against HIV, but this did seem like a positive development. Another writes:

Thanks for that piece of news, Andrew. It actually brought tears to my eyes. I keep forgetting how much we suppress those hopes for a cure, then I read something like that and there's this flame, this glimmer of promise and I'm suddenly in tears. We forget how much that hope for a cure means to us, and how much we've pushed it aside and filed it away.

Right now I'm in this perfect storm of unemployment, heathcare crisis and AIDS.

Since I am, according to some, too lazy or drug-addled to find work, I've had to choose between my COBRA payments and my med copays and Dr. visits. I chose my COBRA payments for fear of that dreaded insurance lapse that would kick in pre-existing exclusions and not getting that all important certificate of coverage for my next (hopefully) job. Since I actually have a home (not sure for how long) and not totally homeless and destitute (yet) I don't qualify for a lot of help. Even if I did now, the state of GA, like many states, now have a Ryan White waiting list to get meds. Even my discount med cards from the drug companies didn't help enough to make them affordable.

So I'm waiting, waiting, waiting – so much has to fall into place, IF I can get a job in the next month or so, and IF they have good benefits, and IF the timing is just right, I might just be able to keep my insurance and go back on my life-saving meds. IF in the next month or so, I don't, I"m hitting several walls, my unemployment running out, my COBRA ending, foreclosure, bankruptcy. That's hoping too that after almost a year off my meds now, that I'm not blindsided by some totally preventable HIV related disease that would put me in the hospital and suddenly make any hope of this turning out well fly right out the window.

I have an older brother who is a wealthy retired executive from Philips, and very much a ditto head. They can't see giving me money since they would just be "enabling" me and keeping me from really looking a job (yes he really said that, almost a verbatim FOX talking talking point). Being a Christian though he did help me rewrite my resume. He keeps saying "just get private insurance" and even "just start my own company" but he hasn't a clue. With my meds running at $10,000 a month and having HIV/AIDS, I'm uninsurable through private health insurance, he doesn't understand that and almost refuses to believe it.

To address a lot of the current bashing of the unemployed: I'm a sharp hard working guy. I had the highest SAT scores in my class, I was pre-med at Wake Forest, two years ago I was making almost $60,000 a year, running an entire print production facility and doing it well. I've worked in consulting firms, F500 marketing departments, I have a killer resume. Yet…

So thanks again for that article. I do still hope. I've been in this crisis from the beginning, HIV+ back before there was even a test or a known cause. I had a partner who was only months ahead of me in progression, yet for every new drug that he just missed being able to take advantage of, I was able to. So our paths that at one time seemed to be almost lockstep veered apart and he died some 20 years ago and I'm still kicking around (I hope). I would just be crushed though that after living the miracle that being a 20+ year long-term survivor entails, that because of seemingly mundane things like a job and health insurance it might all be for nothing.

A reader writes:

No one I know of has yet really pointed out how ridiculous Palin's whole "Mama Grizzlies" spiel is. When she became governor, one of her first acts was to submit a piece of legislation titled the "Active Management – Airborne Shooting" bill. Ostensibly authored by Palin with her name on it, the bill sought to legalize for the first time in our state's history the airborne shooting of bears as part of her predator control advocacy. You can read more about it here.

Beyond that, Palin completely politicized our Alaska Department of Fish and Game by creating a leadership position for family friend Corey Rossi, who is now the Director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation. Rossi was a strong advocate and proponent of bear snaring.

After Palin appointed him, he got a new regulation passed that allowed for the first time in our state's history the snaring of black bears west of Anchorage, even though it was well known that grizzly bears (including sows with cubs, or cubs) would be caught. And sure enough, ten percent of the bears caught last summer in snares were grizzly bears.

Palin's continued use of this Mama Grizzly theme is ironic and hypocritical because she more than anyone has seen to it that grizzly bears, including mama grizzlies and their offspring, will be killed in Alaska. In fact, Rossi is now working to push a new state law this fall that would allow for the public snaring of both black and grizzly bears in the Alaska interior, outside any formal predator control plan. Palin fully supports this.

She's a phony on almost everything.

Ryan Grim surveys the state's congressional delegation on Proposition 19 and gets three yays from Democrats and a wavering nay from a Republican:

Three may not seem like a high number, but it represents the most public support that legalization has garnered from a single state's delegation — and it signals the effect that ballot initiatives can have on advancing the public debate over marijuana policy. Many of the rest of the Democrats in the delegation said they were open to supporting it.

The California NAACP recently endorsed Prop 19, "citing dramatic racial disparities in marijuana

arrests." Scott Morgan picks up on Josh Green's reporting that marijuana initiatives may help Democrats:

The mere notion that state-level marijuana reform efforts can impact national politics is a healthy dose of leverage and legitimacy for our movement. When political pundits begin speculating about our ability to bring out voters, that sends a message to politicians in a language they understand. For decades, the Democratic Party has remained shamefully silent on marijuana policy — despite overwhelming support for reform within its base – all because party leaders persist in clinging foolishly to the 1980's mentality that any departure from the "tough on drugs" doctrine is political suicide. What now?

How Britain has changed since 1997.

(Hat tip: Yau)

Steinglass wants to know why a carbon tax can't replace a payroll tax:

The payroll tax is a tax on human labour; it discourages companies from employing people. A carbon tax is a tax on fuel; it discourages people from using carbon-based fuels. If we shifted our tax structure to tax carbon more and human labour less, we would certainly use less carbon, and we would presumably use more human labour. What are the multipliers showing that this leads to a net loss in production? Why?

(Hat tip: Jack Stuef)

Exum counters Bacevich:

Just because you disagree with the Obama Administration on Afghanistan does not mean that the administration lacks a moral compass. They probably just did a strategic and moral cost-benefit analysis and arrived at a different conclusion than Bacevich did. I understand that Andrew Bacevich is upset about our policy in Afghanistan. But concluding as he does — without any evidence to suggest that moral considerations, such as an obligation to the Afghan people, were not weighed in the president's decision-making process — that the president lacks a moral compass is ugly, unnecessarily ad hominem, and beneath a man of Bacevich's intelligence and humanity. If Bacevich was serious, he would consider not just the strategic risks to a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan — which is what he is apparently advocating — but also the moral costs to be paid by the Afghan people we leave behind. In that light, the moral economics of war are no more black and white than the strategic economics of war. We're left with hard choices and trade-offs, and the public discourse is very poorly served by those who pretend they are easy.

Larison attacks from a different angle:

A truly morally vacuous administration would take the far easier way out, which is to have a much smaller U.S. presence augmented by steady bombardment of the countryside for years to come: there would be far fewer American casualties, the humanitarian disaster created by such tactics would be shrugged off with Rumsfeldian indifference (“stuff happens”), and each new wave of strikes would create another generation of embittered and radicalized enemies whose existence would justify continuing the war indefinitely. This would be an essentially amoral policy that takes no account of the dangers of blowback, but it would be immensely popular and politically very expedient. What should concern us is that Obama’s instinct to accommodate will eventually lead him to embrace such an amoral policy, at which point he will be deserving of the contempt Prof. Bacevich evidently wants to heap on him now.