Labor day, and a blessing for those who work for us to get things done. One guy who produces daily is a fellow named Bill in Portland Maine (which is, btw, a lovely city.) He's on a gig started by us, with money raised by us, so he can write for us. The money raising cycle is coming round again.,.. keep your eye out for it and do what you can.
Harold Meyerson:
Labor Day 2009 is a terrible time to be an American worker.
Robert J. Samuelson:
It's the bleakest Labor Day since at least the early 1980s (unemployment in September 1982: 10.1 percent). With the unemployment rate at 9.7 percent in August and expected to go higher, cheery news is scarce. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, has painted a statistical portrait of today's labor market. Here are some lowlights:
Ross Douthat:
What’s at stake is the right to voluntary euthanasia, not the sort of involuntary plug-pulling that some Republicans have claimed is concealed in the finer print of the current health care reform proposals. But you don’t have to share Sarah Palin’s death panel fears to see perils lurking at the intersection of physician-assisted suicide and health care reform.
Yes, you do. It's fodder for the culture war fringe to be even more irrational than they are now, a la Palin. Saying it in the NYT doesn't make it any less so.
Jeff Jacoby:
What ever happened to the furor over illegal immigration? Two years ago, the denunciation of "crimmigrants’’ was approaching fever pitch, especially in conservative precincts, and woe betide any candidate who appeared before a Republican audience and failed to denounce "amnesty’’ with every ounce of conviction he could muster.
Douthat will get to it, but Palin will get there first.
Roger Cohen:
Speaking of culture and politics, and for that matter Jews, an "affaire" is brewing as the French return from the beaches that may even relegate the [Carla] Bruni-[Woody] Allen talk. It concerns the Egyptian culture minister, his candidacy to head the Paris-based United Nations cultural agency Unesco, and his past talk of burning Israeli books.
Hugh Bailey (Connecticut Post):
Lieberman Makes It Sound So Reasonable
We don't need to open a torture investigation because those actions have already been "condemned and prohibited." It would have a "chilling effect" on our intelligence community. Other officials "previously reviewed allegations of abuse and concluded that prosecution was not warranted."
That's from the statement put out by Sen. Joe Lieberman about the announcement that, after the latest report of detainee abuse was unveiled, there will in fact be a torture investigation. It's the reasoning Lieberman repeated at a meeting with this newspaper's editorial board last week.
Sitting across a table from him, it's almost possible to see his point.
But he leaves so many questions unanswered.
Most important has to do with the fact that torture is supposed to be one of those moral absolutes; even in the face of an enemy bent on killing us all, we're not supposed to stoop to that level.
Instead, it's just another campaign issue.
There's also the fact that breaking the law is supposed to bring punishment. If it doesn't, there's no deterrent. It was "condemned and prohibited." But how do you prohibit something that was already illegal?
h/t Sprinkles
WaPo editorial:
Thanks to planning by President George W. Bush's administration for the avian flu pandemic that never materialized in 2005, the Obama administration had a strong foundation from which to respond to the swine flu outbreak in April. Among other things, contracts were in place with manufacturers to get started on a vaccine for the fall. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, one reason most of the vaccine won't be ready until the mid-October peak is that H1N1 doesn't yield as much material in the lab as seasonal flu does. So the process is taking a little longer. But news that only one dose might be needed could speed up the timetable...
Dr. [Anthony] Fauci (NIH) also said that the risks of the vaccine will be small because "the way you make this vaccine is essentially the same for seasonal flu vaccines we've made for decades." And what about the emergence of a serious side effect after a mass vaccination? Dr. Fauci told us, "No clinical trial in the world can be large enough to definitively detect a very rare adverse event," such as the GBS side effects in 1976. But, he added that surveillance mechanisms today are much better than in 1976. The CDC has set up a post-vaccination program to catch severe side effects and reactions as quickly as possible.
Vaccines do the world a world of good, but safety remains an important issue. OTOH, see yesterday's Abbreviated Pundit Round-up for evidence of increased viral activity as school starts. If you are high risk, consider this voluntary vaccine for you and you family. Everyone else can get a shot as vaccine becomes available, but high risk goes first.