News bits

Federal judge forced to make a crackpot ruling

by a crackpot Supreme Court ruling

As radicalism and crackpot reasoning engulf the federal courts, one can watch the rot set in and deepen over time. Watching democracy and the rule of law rot away is sort of like a spectator sport if one adopts the right mindset. Salon writes:

For decades, federal law has forbidden gun owners from scratching out the serial numbers that manufacturers are legally required to place on firearms. The reason is obvious: These serial numbers help state and federal law enforcement trace guns that are used in crimes and identify suspected shooters. Indeed, the only apparent reason anyone would remove a serial number is to avoid becoming a suspect after their gun is used illegally. On Wednesday, however, a federal judge ruled that the law prohibiting alteration of serial numbers violates the Second Amendment. Why? Because serial numbers were virtually nonexistent when the amendment was ratified in 1791, so the government has no power to mandate them today.

This decision in United States v. Price by U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin, a Bill Clinton appointee, may sound shocking. But it is a perfectly plausible application of the Supreme Court’s June ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that case, Justice Clarence Thomas declared all gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional if they infringe on “the individual right to armed self-defense.” (The Constitution says nothing about “self-defense,” but Thomas gleaned this right from its penumbra.) A gun restriction may only survive legal scrutiny, the justice declared, if it had an “analogue” in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, or 1868, when it was imposed on the states. The burden falls on the government to prove the existence of a historical analogue.  

Thomas’ test has already wreaked havoc in the lower courts. One judge has struck down a Texas law that prohibits 18 to 20-year-olds from carrying a handgun outside the home. People under 21 are significantly more likely to commit gun homicides—but in Bruen, Thomas announced that courts may never consider the real-world, life-saving impact of gun safety laws when gauging their constitutionality. A different Texas judge invalidated a federal law barring individuals from purchasing a handgun while they’re under indictment, even for a violent felony offense. Just last week, another judge struck down New York’s ban on concealed carry in airports, train stations, domestic violence shelters, summer camps, the subway, and other “sensitive locations.” Now Goodwin, who sits in West Virginia, has joined the chorus of lower court judges who feel that Bruen obliges them to strike down longstanding, widely accepted firearm laws.  

Goodwin acknowledged the “argument” that “firearms with an obliterated serial number are likely to be used in violent crime and therefore a prohibition on their possession is desirable.” But he explained that this argument “is the exact type of means-end reasoning the Supreme Court has forbidden me from considering.” Even if the serial number law demonstrably saved tens of thousands of lives each year, that fact would be totally irrelevant to the constitutional analysis.

A single crackpot radical right Supreme Court ruling based on rigid ideological “reasoning” made-up in the fly has forced the entire federal judiciary into crackpottery and rot. Make no mistake fellow spectators, this is just the beginning of the rot, not the end.

A spectator watching the rot set in

Bill Mahr gets in a snit about The Herschel

The Hill writes:

Political commentator Bill Maher slammed Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker as “unfit for office” and called him a “f—ing idiot.”

On his HBO show “Real Time” on Friday, Maher pointed to numerous statements Walker has made and reports about him that have come out that he said show why Walker should not be elected to the Senate.

“He’s just a f—ing idiot on a scale on a scale almost impossible to parody,” Maher said.

He said Walker has admitted to threatening violence against multiple people around him, including his ex-wife. He said Walker has lied about his past on numerous occasions, including by falsely claiming to have been a police officer and an FBI agent.

What set Bill of seems to lie in the difficulty of parody a creature as bizarre as The Herschel. Poor Bill. He’ll get over it. Send him thoughts and prayers.

Bill’s frustration

In other The Herschel news 

In a different article, the Hill writes:

The Memo: Walker gives GOP hope with Georgia debate performance

Republican Herschel Walker won a moral victory by avoiding disaster at his sole televised debate with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) Friday.

In the process, the former football star will have given his party hope that he can overcome a checkered campaign to prevail in the race, which could plausibly determine control of the Senate.

There you have it. The Herschel wins by not being a disaster in a debate he clearly lost. 

Poor Bill

Send thoughts and prayers

About those exorbitant drug prices

ars Technica writes:

A new study finds no correlation between R&D spending and outlandish drug prices.

Americans, though, probably weren’t shocked. Prescription drugs in the US cost about 2.5 times what they do in other countries, and a quarter of Americans find it difficult to afford them. Almost every new cancer drug starts at over $100,000 a year. And a 2022 study found that every year, the average price of newly released drugs is 20 percent higher.

How drug prices are set in the US is a mysterious black box. When rationalizing their lofty price tags, one of the most common reasons pharmaceutical companies will cite is that a high price is needed to make good on the money invested in research and development.

But is that true? “You hear it so much,” says Olivier Wouters, an assistant professor of health policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “That’s why I was like, well, let’s get some data, because I don’t believe it. I don’t think anyone believes it.”

To anybody in the field, the response to the paper’s finding is: Well, duh. We know what drives drug pricing, says Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s, ‘How far can I go? What will the market bear?’” Still, Emanuel says, it’s important to have empirical data like this study to refute the industry’s claim.

Every so often, there are small glimpses behind the curtains into how pharmaceutical companies actually decide on a drug price. An example of this is the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, which was put on the market in 2013 for a steep $84,000 per 12-week course. In 2015, an 18-month-long US government investigation that reviewed some 20,000 pages of internal company documents revealed that Gilead, the company that owned the drug, had set the high price as a way “to ensure its drugs had the greatest share of the market, for the highest price, for the longest period of time”—in essence, that it was prioritizing profit. In response Gilead said it “stand[s] behind the pricing of our therapies because of the benefit they bring to patients and the significant value they represent to payers, providers, and our entire healthcare system by reducing the long-term costs associated with managing chronic [hepatitis C virus].”