"Slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

Challenger, 25 years ago today.

For Alphie

I love love love this Dave Edmunds version of Elvis Costello's Girls Talk. Hope you do to Alphie!

Toe-Tappin' Rockabilly!

Who's On First?

Another wacky bleeding heart liberal? Not exactly.

An Arkansas lawmaker has dropped her proposal to require state colleges and hospitals to provide interpreters for some workers after she said activists flooded lawmakers with complaints about the measure.

Republican Sen. Ruth Whitaker of Cedarville on Wednesday withdrew her proposal and said she'd no longer pursue it during the session. Whitaker's proposal would have required state-funded hospitals, colleges and universities to provide an interpreter if an employee's English skills "would materially interfere" with a job requiring oral communication.

Latest From The Religion Of Pieces

An apparent suicide bomber at  Moscow's Domodedovo Airport has killed at least 30 and injured hundreds of travelers waiting to claim their baggage, in the latest assault by muslims on humanity.

What's Another Billion Dollars?

The geniuses in the Obama regime are now tackling pharmaceutical drug research.  A billion tax dollars are about to be flushed down the crapper, and that's just start-up money:

The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.

The plan?  The gummint develops the new drugs (what could go wrong?), and then hands the production (and profits) off to Big Pharma.  An empty payback for Big Pharma's support of ObamaCare?  GlaxoSmithKline must be cringing in horror.  The whole ball of wax is the personal playground of one dude...er, I mean czar:

Creating the center is a signature effort of Dr. Collins, who once directed the agency’s Human Genome Project. Dr. Collins has been predicting for years that gene sequencing will lead to a vast array of new treatments, but years of effort and tens of billions of dollars in financing by drug makers in gene-related research has largely been a bust.

As a result, industry has become far less willing to follow the latest genetic advances with expensive clinical trials. Rather than wait longer, Dr. Collins has decided that the government can start the work itself.

“I am a little frustrated to see how many of the discoveries that do look as though they have therapeutic implications are waiting for the pharmaceutical industry to follow through with them,” he said.

Dr. Collins’s ability to conceive and create such a center in a few short months would have been impossible for most of his predecessors, who had nice offices but little power. But Congress in recent years has invested real budgetary and administrative authority in the director’s office, and Dr. Collins is the first to fully use these new powers.

The name of the new bureaucracy is the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. N-CATS.  I wonder who thought of that funky little acronym?  The comments section was interesting too.

Howie Schneider

Orange Park Florida

January 22nd, 2011

10:14 pm 

We can only assume these will be no-bid, sole source, union jobs with lottery winner style pensions without having to buy a ticket that will not be taxed at the state level and of course they will be fully competitive like the postal service, police and firemen, teachers, federal and state workers not to mention railroad jobs where 97% go on disability while the other 3% await more paperwork. I can't wait for this badly needed medicine. Give me a Witch Doctor instead please