Carnival of Liberty XXIII is up at Below the Beltway. There is, as always, a bunch of really great posts on the topic. In reading through it so far, I’ve already discovered some great posts from folks such as Coyote…

Carnival of Liberty XXIII is up at Below the Beltway. There is, as always, a bunch of really great posts on the topic. In reading through it so far, I’ve already discovered some great posts from folks such as Coyote…

Carnival of Liberty XXIII is up at Below the Beltway. There is, as always, a bunch of really great posts on the topic. In reading through it so far, I’ve already discovered some great posts from folks such as Coyote…

Carnival of Liberty XXIII is up at Below the Beltway. There is, as always, a bunch of really great posts on the topic. In reading through it so far, I’ve already discovered some great posts from folks such as Coyote…

Welcome once again to Below The Beltway as I play host to the Carnival of Liberty for the second week in a row. This wasn’t a planned hosting on my part, but Eric asked me to step in and, since I had such a great time hosting last week’s carnival, I …

http://www.acsblog.org/solomon-amendment-fair-v-rumsfeld-2353-polsby-not-a-case-about-gays-and-the-military.html

There is a real poignancy to the exercise of this broad power that your post rightly stresses. You say: “A freedom of speech or expressive association that protects traditionalist churches also protects liberal universities.” Yes. Just so. But while we are on the subject of pari passu, let’s remember that the Civil Rights Restoration Act was supported by people who thought that the proverbial “the knock at the door” would never be at their door but always at the door of some goiter-stricken, Bible-thumping, gun-toting rustic with eighteen teeth and a pick-up truck. The pipe dream was that federally imposed requirements, more or less obnoxious, were always going to be visited on other people, never on oneself. Prof. Tribe exemplifies this exquisitely purblind sensibility in his recently expressed worry whether the Supreme Court could be trusted to “write an opinion with the degree of delicacy required to strike down the Solomon Amendment in a way that does not endanger the vigorous uses of Title VI and Title IX. . . . .”

“Delicacy”! You gotta love it! As though a Congress with the power to do good in Greenville, South Carolina would not also, and apodictically, be a Congress with the power to do good in New Haven and Cambridge! To paraphrase your post: A Civil Rights Restoration Act strong enough to protect our people from the prejudices of traditionalist institutions is an inevitable template for a Solomon Amendment strong enough to protect our people from the prejudices of liberal universities. Schools like Bob Jones University and Grove City College have learned to adapt to the Civil Rights Restoration Act. Yale must learn to adapt to the Solomon Amendment.

Hell yes. Medical advances build on each other, and when you inject a delay into every step, and cut off certain pathways by forbidding people to take some of the drugs, the number of years we are behind where we should be in medical technology keeps going up as time goes on.

This has been going on for a hell of a long time. Could we have gotten an anti-aging drug by now? Hard to tell, but at some point the gap will be such that every death by so-called “natural causes” is attributable to the FDA’s stalling. The only open question is whether we have reached that point or not.

“But come on, when there is such huge money to be made, do you really trust the market to operate efficiently enough to protect the consumers when their lives are at stake?”

I trust the market to operate efficiently enough to allow consumers to take a level of risk that they deem appropriate, and to allow consumers to protect themselves as much as they consider proper. Corporations are great at meeting demand, but they absolutely suck at being substitute parents; I don’t consider that a problem because I don’t think consumers need substitute parents.

. . . And you can hear the lament – how did we let Bush and these conservative idiots take control of the beautiful [governmental] machine we built? My answer is that you shouldn’t have built the machine in…

There were a number of extraordinary posts in the month of November. Take a look at Carnival of Liberty XIX, XX, XXI, XXII and the newly-minted blog called The Liberty Papers and you will see what I mean. After much consideration, these are the top p…

Ironically, we are about as safe now as we were before the Feds got involved in drug regulation. The original impetus for the establishment of what became the FDA were patent medicines loaded with opium and cocaine. Scientific medicines produced by corporations hardly existed. Will still have patent medicines laced with dangerous drugs but now they are call “all-natural food supplements” and the FDA is prevented by law from regulating them.

The current FDA does not exist to protect people from dangerous drugs but to protect people from “evil corporations.” People are quite free to poison themselves anyway the won’t as long as no large corporation makes a profit from it. This same mindset also contributes to the suppression of drugs that could save lives. It more important to harm corporations than to protect public safety.