House schedules hearings on the Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) three days after it expires. Most (but not all) states have not used up their CHIP funding, but it still should be grotesquely easy to run ads against Republicans -- they tried to take your health care away, and became so obsessed with taking your health care away that they they allowed your kids' health insurance to expire! Of course, the fact that it'll beat Republicans everywhere in America is, I suspect, the very reason Democrats won't do it.
Washington state files suit against Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin (a.k.a. "hillbilly heroin"), saying that Purdue essentially ran "an uncontrolled experiment on the American public" by marketing the opioid without being able to prove that it worked as a painkiller. Of course, this also marks a failure on the part of federal regulators, though the FDA's failure pales next to the sheer chutzpah of Purdue, which actually told the FDA not to approve generic versions of Oxy because it wasn't safe.
I questioned whether Hugh Hefner had a positive influence on American culture even when you set aside his objectification of women, but let the record show that Mr. Hefner was also an extraordinarily exploitative boss, and mainly of his female bunnies. He made them pay for their costumes even though drunk men were constantly going at them (particularly at their bunny tails), plus he gobbled up 50 percent of their tips and garnished more than that in a complicated "demerit" system wherein bunnies lost wages for "bad make-up" or eating on the job -- and that's before we get to the, ah, difficult work of pretending to be nice to drunk men.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech at Georgetown University Law School about freedom of speech, but someone -- maybe our Attorney General, maybe the school -- decided to disinvite a group of law school students planning to protest the event. It should be tough to convince large numbers of people that law school students were merely trying to be "disruptive," but the First Amendment doesn't protect you from other people disrupting your speech, and just imagine the whining from the right if something similar had happened at, say, an Eric Holder speech on the topic.
We've been learning about the kinds of things EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt likes to spend taxpayer money on, even as he's trying to cut the EPA budget, but I wasn't prepared to learn that, aside from private flights and a security detail that would make a movie star jealous, he wants to spend $25,000 on a soundproof phone booth in which he can make calls. That's right, Scott Pruitt doesn't even want his own co-workers to listen in on his phone calls to big corporate sugar daddies, so he wants a cone of silence. We can only hope it works exactly as well as this one.
Comments