“As a big employer that the government made a big bet on, ‘GM starts off in a position where institutional Washington has to be rooting for it to come through,’ said Larry Kamer, a public affairs strategist who worked in the past for GM and Toyota.” [Washington Post, related] Talk about spotting a dangerous defect that needs fixing…
Archive for March, 2014
P.J. O’Rourke on that viral Supreme Court brief
The humorist speaks out on the now-famous amicus filing: “Cato did not ask me to write their brief for the same reason that you do not ask me to perform your appendectomy. … I was asked to read it and give it my endorsement because I am an expert on being run out of Ohio. Ask my mother.” He goes on to give Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus kinder treatment than he does President William Howard Taft. [Daily Beast, earlier, the brief in Susan B. Anthony List v. Steven Driehaus, more on case from SCOTUSBlog]
Sure, officer, what would you like me to say?
Durham police paid undisclosed “conviction bonuses” to informants in drug cases, a practice both prosecutors and defense lawyers say comes as a surprise to them [IndyWeek]
Medical roundup
- Latest don’t-blame-the-regulators shortage of a generic medical supply is nitroglycerin for acute cardiac care [New York Times, ACSH]
- “Does Medical Malpractice Law Improve Health Care Quality?” Maybe not so much [Michael Frakes and Anupam Jena, SSRN via Tyler Cowen]
- “Affordable Care Act opening doors to IT security attacks” [Ponemon via Fierce CIO] “States Barred from Requiring Obamacare Navigators Carry Error and Omission Insurance” [Craig Gottwals, Benefit Revolution] On suspension of statutory dates, Rule of Law has scanty constituency [Ramesh Ponnuru]
- “Video Debate: Richard Epstein and Ryan Abbott on FDA, Off-Label Drug Use” [Bill of Health]
- “Trial lawyers helped FDA with rule opening generic drug firms to lawsuits” [Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner]
- Everyone including the agency itself discontented with FDA’s handling of new sunscreen ingredients [WaPo via Alex Tabarrok]
- Does writing up a more careful patient chart help keep a doctor from getting sued? [White Coat]
FDA rules could block use of brewers’ wastes as animal feed
So long, small-and-sustainable: critics say new Food and Drug Administration regulations implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act could render uneconomic the immemorial practice of using spent beer grains to feed livestock. Both farmers and brewers are upset. [Bangor Daily News/Lewiston, Me., Sun-Journal; proposed rule] More: Glenn Lammi, WLF.
Students “told to destroy rare Dodge Viper”
Olympia, Wash.: “A community college says it’s the pride of their automotive technology program: a rare Dodge Viper donated to their school worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.” It’s believed to be the fourth one off the assembly line. But now Chrysler has “ordered the destruction of their entire educational Viper fleet.” It seems that while the prototypes were never meant to be driven on public roads, “two of them somehow got out and into accidents, costing Chrysler’s parent company millions of dollars.” Things might be different if our law respected a sale or other contractual agreement between Chrysler and the school as reason to release the manufacturer from a suit filed by an injured third party. But it doesn’t. Chrysler’s deadline for ordering the cars crushed has now passed; no word at present as to whether any of the cars have been reprieved or otherwise survived. [KING, AutoWeek, Tacoma News Tribune, Motor Trend]
Maryland roundup
- Prosecution for profit: False Claims Act, empowering private lawyers to sue businesses on behalf of the state and rake off 25 percent bounty for themselves, passes House of Delegates on near-party line vote [roll call, text, Chamber view, COST on tax-dispute angle]
- Senate votes 36-8 to decriminalize marijuana [Capital Gazette, WBAL] U-MD paper covers panel discussion I was on recently in College Park [Diamondback]
- Fiasco of state’s ObamaCare exchange continues to resonate [Petula Dvorak, WaPo; picking up and starting over; Geoffrey Norman, Weekly Standard]
- Cronyism in hospitality politics discourages the less well-connected [Vinny Sidhu, Point of Law]
- Committee kills proposed first-in-nation ban on sale of energy drinks to minors [CBS Baltimore, Assembly]
- Time to rein in Maryland’s license-plate-recognition surveillance system? [Capital News Service, earlier]
- Much lauded by politicos, Frederick Housing Authority-assisted “first net-zero energy neighborhood in the nation” flounders amid financial, legal, logistical setbacks [Frederick News-Post]
“How can you write about the Hobby Lobby case…”
“…without mentioning the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?” You can if you’re Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker, busy stroking your readers’ presumed ideological prejudices. [Ann Althouse, and followup on an unsatisfactory correction]
P.S. From Prof. Michael McConnell, a much better article.
“Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better”
Yesterday Yale Law professor emeritus Peter Schuck visited Cato to discuss his new book, and Arnold Kling commented, with me moderating. More about the book and its arguments is here, and a further note from Kling.
An editorial voice on forfeiture
Would that other newspapers were as forthright as calling for an end to “policing for profit” as the Grand Forks Herald. North Dakota is already considered to be one of the states that does best at curbing the abuse of civil forfeiture; adjoining Minnesota does less well.