Month: September 2021

CNN’s Joan Biskupic on Justices Leaking Information To Her: “Don’t I wish.”

Over the past several years, CNN Reporter Joan Biskupic has received leaks from the Supreme Court. It is not clear if she is talking to the Justices, to law clerks, or to people who know the Justices or law clerks. Based on these leaks, Joan wrote about private conferences, internal deliberations, changes in opinion authorship, and even personal dynamics between the Justices. These leaks are intriguing, but ultimately, dangerous for the Court.

I don’t blame Biskupic. She is a committed reporter who does her job. It isn’t her role to preserve the Court. Her job is to report. And she does it better than just about anyone else.

Shortly after the October 2020 term concluded, I started the countdown for Biskupic’s next leaks. But this year was different. Her reporting from the current term lacked any inside information. I speculated that Justice Ginsburg’s absence may have dried up her sources.

Now, here we are in early September. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket is in overdrive. And people are clamoring for inside information about the Court’s deliberations. But Biskupic has not published any inside information.

Mike Sacks tweeted, “I am honestly astounded the liberal clerks or even justices haven’t started leaking deliberations on big cases yet given how hopeless their cause is now.” He added, “If the current crop of liberal SCOTUS clerks remain too careerist to leak what’s going on to us around here, then yo justices lurking here at least go tell it @JoanBiskupic like you always do.”

Joan replied, “Don’t I wish.”

 

 

I was shocked by this tweet. I don’t recall ever seeing a Supreme Court reporter make a public appeal to the Justices to leak information. Usually, these entreaties are made through backchannels. But Joan has now sent out the Bat Signal, seeking help. Leaking private deliberations violates the canons of judicial ethics. Granted, the Supreme Court justices are not bound by the code of judicial conduct, but they generally purport to follow the rules. Here, Joan is publicly asking Justices to violate their code of conduct.

The first analogy that came to mind was when Trump asked Russia to release Hillary’s emails. Trump later claimed he was joking. Maybe Joan will also say she was being sarcastic. It doesn’t matter. The damage was done.

Ultimately, this cavalier approach to leaks may be counterproductive. If Joan does write something about internal deliberations, the presumption will be that her Bat Signal tweet stirred the pot. Justices, and those in their orbit, who may have been tempted to feed Joan would look elsewhere.

Yesterday, I wrote about Joan’s podcast with SCOTUSBlog. The real reason I transcribed the session was to see if Joan discussed her leaks. And she did (starting at 20:20):

Now as I, as I’m working on these books. And as I worked on the Chief’s book, I was also trying to add something for readers about the behind-the-scenes dynamic that would inform the current court. And I think that I think I first got a taste of that when I was doing the book on Justice Sotomayor. The book I wrote about Justice Sotomayor, which follows the Antonin Scalia book was not a biography, like the O’Connor and Scalia books were it was much more of a political history. But because while I was doing that, I got some inside information about some, you know, some events at the court and switched votes. For example, what happened behind the scenes when they the justices first took up the University of Texas at Austin case that had been brought up by Abigail Fisher, the affirmative action case, that kind of gave me a taste for finding out more of what was happening behind the scenes. So I, I found that I was pivoting a little bit to try to get more up-to-date information of what was happening, even though I was looking back at people’s lives. And that’s why when I did the Chief, the book on the Chief, it was a real pleasure to go to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where his parents had met, grown up and, you know, go to the library there to study the ethnic history of his family. But it was also quite challenging to find out, for example, what had really happened in the first Affordable Care Act case where he, you know, we had known that he had changed his vote on the individual insurance mandate, because of the reporting Jan Crawford had done. But I found that along the way, that he also switched his vote on the Medicaid portion. And I became interested in that and wanting to pull that out of various sources at the court. And that has become a nice challenge to have. And that sort of subtext of of my reporting is not, you know, it’s not the main thing that I want people to take from these books, because I want them to be, you know, character studies. But it’s been a nice little bonus. And it’s helped bring more attention to the reporting, because people, people hardly know anything about what’s going on behind the scenes. The court carefully guards a lot of this. And it’s been, I felt fortunate that I’ve been able to find out some things.

I hope the Justices, and their clerks, exercise even greater discipline to avoid further leaks. Let Joan keep wishing.

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Social Security Will Be Insolvent in 12 Years


dreamstime_xl_125751504

The fiscal crisis looming over Social Security is no longer a distant threat. The national pension system will be insolvent by the time workers now in their mid-50s are ready to retire.

The annual report to Congress from the Social Security Trustees, released this week, paints a grim picture of an entitlement program that was already veering towards insolvency before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that trend. The Trustees now estimate that Social Security will be unable to pay the full amount of promised benefits by 2033, one year sooner than the same report estimated last year. Absent any policy changes, beneficiaries will receive just 78 percent of what they’ve been promised starting in 2034.

The pandemic caused a spike in retirements, but the underlying issues with Social Security remain the same as they’ve been for decades: the math simply doesn’t add up.

Social Security will see negative cash flow of $147 billion this year, and the deficits will keep adding up as the population ages and there are fewer workers paying into the system relative to the number of retirees collecting benefits. Last year, there were 65 million Americans getting benefits from Social Security, while 175 million people paid into the system via payroll taxes, according to the Trustees’ report. That’s less than three workers for every beneficiary, a near-historic low.

Those deficits will eat up the Social Security Trust Fund over the next decade, and insolvency awaits. The trust fund itself is actually an accounting fiction—it contains nothing except IOUs that the government has written to itself over the years. In some ways, then, what the country is really facing is the evaporation of the pleasant fiction of the trust fund as a backstop for its largest entitlement program.

The big question also remains the same: when will Congress take this imminent crisis seriously?

The last time Social Security recorded a deficit, in 1982, it spurred lawmakers to make several changes, including an increase to the payroll tax that funds Social Security, to keep the program solvent for a few more decades. This time, however, there is almost no indication that either major party is prepared to act.

The bulk of Social Security’s funding comes from a 12.4 percent payroll tax that’s split 50/50 between employers and employees. Only the first $142,800 of income is subject to the tax. Lifting or removing the cap, or raising the tax rate, would generate more revenue for the system. Alternatively, reducing benefits for some or all beneficiaries—either by instituting across-the-board reductions or by means-testing in some way—could bring Social Security’s liabilities in line with its assets.

Ensuring Social Security’s solvency for the next 75 years would require hiking the payroll tax by 3.36 percentage points today, or making an across-the-board 21 percent cut in benefits.

The more time that passes, the heavier the lift will be. According to an analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for low deficits and sustainable entitlement programs, delaying action until insolvency hits in 2034 will make the needed tax increases or benefit reductions about 25 percent larger than if Congress acted today. In either case, the changes will be seriously disruptive to Americans’ retirement plans and financial security.

 

Inflation is also going to take a toll on Social Security. The Wall Street Journal reports that senior administration officials believe the program will automatically provide 6 percent cost-of-living adjustments next year. That’s significantly higher than the 1.3 percent and 1.6 percent adjustments provided in the past two years.

When Social Security launched in 1935, the average life expectancy for Americans was 61. That means the average person died four years before qualifying for benefits. It was imagined as a safety net for the truly needy, not a conveyor belt to transfer wealth from the younger, working population to the older, relatively wealthier retired population.

Now, the average American lives to 78, more than a decade past the age (67) when they can start collecting Social Security benefits—and 16 years beyond the eligibility age (62) for early retirees to collect partial benefits.

Restoring Social Security to its proper place as an old-age entitlement program and not a national pension system would be a good place for Congress to start. That means raising the eligibility age for benefits. And given the federal government’s track record of awful fiscal management, it also makes sense to empower individuals to control more of their retirement savings. Privatizing Social Security—or at least letting individuals opt-out of the program so they can escape the sinking ship—would be a huge win for younger workers who have time to save on their own.

Congress has mostly abandoned any pretense of fiscal sanity, but the math governing Social Security’s decline is inexorable. Waiting any longer to take it seriously only invites a bigger mess.

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CNN’s Joan Biskupic on Justices Leaking Information To Her: “Don’t I wish.”

Over the past several years, CNN Reporter Joan Biskupic has received leaks from the Supreme Court. It is not clear if she is talking to the Justices, to law clerks, or to people who know the Justices or law clerks. Based on these leaks, Joan wrote about private conferences, internal deliberations, changes in opinion authorship, and even personal dynamics between the Justices. These leaks are intriguing, but ultimately, dangerous for the Court.

I don’t blame Biskupic. She is a committed reporter who does her job. It isn’t her role to preserve the Court. Her job is to report. And she does it better than just about anyone else.

Shortly after the October 2020 term concluded, I started the countdown for Biskupic’s next leaks. But this year was different. Her reporting from the current term lacked any inside information. I speculated that Justice Ginsburg’s absence may have dried up her sources.

Now, here we are in early September. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket is in overdrive. And people are clamoring for inside information about the Court’s deliberations. But Biskupic has not published any inside information.

Mike Sacks tweeted, “I am honestly astounded the liberal clerks or even justices haven’t started leaking deliberations on big cases yet given how hopeless their cause is now.” He added, “If the current crop of liberal SCOTUS clerks remain too careerist to leak what’s going on to us around here, then yo justices lurking here at least go tell it @JoanBiskupic like you always do.”

Joan replied, “Don’t I wish.”

 

 

I was shocked by this tweet. I don’t recall ever seeing a Supreme Court reporter make a public appeal to the Justices to leak information. Usually, these entreaties are made through backchannels. But Joan has now sent out the Bat Signal, seeking help. Leaking private deliberations violates the canons of judicial ethics. Granted, the Supreme Court justices are not bound by the code of judicial conduct, but they generally purport to follow the rules. Here, Joan is publicly asking Justices to violate their code of conduct.

The first analogy that came to mind was when Trump asked Russia to release Hillary’s emails. Trump later claimed he was joking. Maybe Joan will also say she was being sarcastic. It doesn’t matter. The damage was done.

Ultimately, this cavalier approach to leaks may be counterproductive. If Joan does write something about internal deliberations, the presumption will be that her Bat Signal tweet stirred the pot. Justices, and those in their orbit, who may have been tempted to feed Joan would look elsewhere.

Yesterday, I wrote about Joan’s podcast with SCOTUSBlog. The real reason I transcribed the session was to see if Joan discussed her leaks. And she did (starting at 20:20):

Now as I, as I’m working on these books. And as I worked on the Chief’s book, I was also trying to add something for readers about the behind-the-scenes dynamic that would inform the current court. And I think that I think I first got a taste of that when I was doing the book on Justice Sotomayor. The book I wrote about Justice Sotomayor, which follows the Antonin Scalia book was not a biography, like the O’Connor and Scalia books were it was much more of a political history. But because while I was doing that, I got some inside information about some, you know, some events at the court and switched votes. For example, what happened behind the scenes when they the justices first took up the University of Texas at Austin case that had been brought up by Abigail Fisher, the affirmative action case, that kind of gave me a taste for finding out more of what was happening behind the scenes. So I, I found that I was pivoting a little bit to try to get more up-to-date information of what was happening, even though I was looking back at people’s lives. And that’s why when I did the Chief, the book on the Chief, it was a real pleasure to go to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where his parents had met, grown up and, you know, go to the library there to study the ethnic history of his family. But it was also quite challenging to find out, for example, what had really happened in the first Affordable Care Act case where he, you know, we had known that he had changed his vote on the individual insurance mandate, because of the reporting Jan Crawford had done. But I found that along the way, that he also switched his vote on the Medicaid portion. And I became interested in that and wanting to pull that out of various sources at the court. And that has become a nice challenge to have. And that sort of subtext of of my reporting is not, you know, it’s not the main thing that I want people to take from these books, because I want them to be, you know, character studies. But it’s been a nice little bonus. And it’s helped bring more attention to the reporting, because people, people hardly know anything about what’s going on behind the scenes. The court carefully guards a lot of this. And it’s been, I felt fortunate that I’ve been able to find out some things.

I hope the Justices, and their clerks, exercise even greater discipline to avoid further leaks. Let Joan keep wishing.

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50,000 People Evacuated As Firepocalypse Ravages South Lake Tahoe 

50,000 People Evacuated As Firepocalypse Ravages South Lake Tahoe 

By the day, the fire situation on the ground of South Lake Tahoe continues to worsen, with more than 200,000 acres burned, 50,000 people evacuated, and a red flag warning that remains in effect for a swath of eastern California.

According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, otherwise known as CAL Fire, the Caldor Fire has burned 204,390 acres as of Wednesday morning and is only 20% contained. The fire is rapidly expanding because of favorable weather conditions, such as low humidity, hot temperatures, and winds. 

Evacuation orders for all residents in the South Lake Tahoe area began on Tuesday, and so far, 50,000 people have been relocated. Winds are expected to pick up Wednesday, adding more fuel to the fire as a red flag warning is in effect until Wednesday night. 

Military planes have been tracking the fire and guiding firefighters to hotspots hidden underneath the dense smoke.

“Very, very sensitive sensors can pick up any signature of heat,” said Joel Kerley, a Department of the Interior bureau aviation manager. “We’ll plot it, we’ll get that down to the firefighter on the ground, and they can go attack it.”

We showed yesterday probably the most shocking video from what is now being dubbed ‘Lake Tahell.’ 

Evacuee Glen Naasz told CBS News that he’s “afraid” the fire will “burn down the jewel of California,” referring to the Lake Tahoe area. 

The Sacramento Bee said the fire threatens 34,000 homes and buildings around Lake Tahoe. Gov. Gavin Newsom has said it’s the state’s “No. 1 priority” to extinguish the blaze. 

At least 4,000 firefighters and 1,000 National Guard members are battling the fire though Mother Nature has yet to offer any signs of relief. 

Another large wildfire burning in the state is the Dixie Fire, which has already scorched 844,000 acres across five counties and is a little more than half contained. 

The silver lining is that the fire will wipe out chipmunks infected with the plague. 

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/01/2021 – 15:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3yBvnFi Tyler Durden

Social Security Will Be Insolvent in 12 Years


dreamstime_xl_125751504

The fiscal crisis looming over Social Security is no longer a distant threat. The national pension system will be insolvent by the time workers now in their mid-50s are ready to retire.

The annual report to Congress from the Social Security Trustees, released this week, paints a grim picture of an entitlement program that was already veering towards insolvency before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that trend. The Trustees now estimate that Social Security will be unable to pay the full amount of promised benefits by 2033, one year sooner than the same report estimated last year. Absent any policy changes, beneficiaries will receive just 78 percent of what they’ve been promised starting in 2034.

The pandemic caused a spike in retirements, but the underlying issues with Social Security remain the same as they’ve been for decades: the math simply doesn’t add up.

Social Security will see negative cash flow of $147 billion this year, and the deficits will keep adding up as the population ages and there are fewer workers paying into the system relative to the number of retirees collecting benefits. Last year, there were 65 million Americans getting benefits from Social Security, while 175 million people paid into the system via payroll taxes, according to the Trustees’ report. That’s less than three workers for every beneficiary, a near-historic low.

Those deficits will eat up the Social Security Trust Fund over the next decade, and insolvency awaits. The trust fund itself is actually an accounting fiction—it contains nothing except IOUs that the government has written to itself over the years. In some ways, then, what the country is really facing is the evaporation of the pleasant fiction of the trust fund as a backstop for its largest entitlement program.

The big question also remains the same: when will Congress take this imminent crisis seriously?

The last time Social Security recorded a deficit, in 1982, it spurred lawmakers to make several changes, including an increase to the payroll tax that funds Social Security, to keep the program solvent for a few more decades. This time, however, there is almost no indication that either major party is prepared to act.

The bulk of Social Security’s funding comes from a 12.4 percent payroll tax that’s split 50/50 between employers and employees. Only the first $142,800 of income is subject to the tax. Lifting or removing the cap, or raising the tax rate, would generate more revenue for the system. Alternatively, reducing benefits for some or all beneficiaries—either by instituting across-the-board reductions or by means-testing in some way—could bring Social Security’s liabilities in line with its assets.

Ensuring Social Security’s solvency for the next 75 years would require hiking the payroll tax by 3.36 percentage points today, or making an across-the-board 21 percent cut in benefits.

The more time that passes, the heavier the lift will be. According to an analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for low deficits and sustainable entitlement programs, delaying action until insolvency hits in 2034 will make the needed tax increases or benefit reductions about 25 percent larger than if Congress acted today. In either case, the changes will be seriously disruptive to Americans’ retirement plans and financial security.

 

Inflation is also going to take a toll on Social Security. The Wall Street Journal reports that senior administration officials believe the program will automatically provide 6 percent cost-of-living adjustments next year. That’s significantly higher than the 1.3 percent and 1.6 percent adjustments provided in the past two years.

When Social Security launched in 1935, the average life expectancy for Americans was 61. That means the average person died four years before qualifying for benefits. It was imagined as a safety net for the truly needy, not a conveyor belt to transfer wealth from the younger, working population to the older, relatively wealthier retired population.

Now, the average American lives to 78, more than a decade past the age (67) when they can start collecting Social Security benefits—and 16 years beyond the eligibility age (62) for early retirees to collect partial benefits.

Restoring Social Security to its proper place as an old-age entitlement program and not a national pension system would be a good place for Congress to start. That means raising the eligibility age for benefits. And given the federal government’s track record of awful fiscal management, it also makes sense to empower individuals to control more of their retirement savings. Privatizing Social Security—or at least letting individuals opt-out of the program so they can escape the sinking ship—would be a huge win for younger workers who have time to save on their own.

Congress has mostly abandoned any pretense of fiscal sanity, but the math governing Social Security’s decline is inexorable. Waiting any longer to take it seriously only invites a bigger mess.

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The Secret To Vaccinating Children: Off-Label Vaccinations


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With the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19 granted full approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use on anyone ages 13 and up, pediatricians can actually now legally give it to patients under 12 years old, even though the drug is not yet technically approved for this age group. This is because once a drug is FDA approved, physicians can legally prescribe drugs off-label, beyond the scope of the drugs’ initial approval, if they judge that it is medically appropriate. Yet while some parents have successfully scheduled vaccines for their younger children, pediatric vaccination is likely to remain unavailable to most families even as children return to school in communities that are facing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases and pediatric hospitalizations are on the rise.

Pediatric vaccination is unlikely to become widely available for two reasons. First, FDA marketing restrictions prevent manufacturers from publicizing information about off-label vaccination for kids younger than 12. Second, public health authorities at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are discouraging off-label prescribing, citing a lack of data regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccines for younger patients, and many parents and providers follow the guidance of those officials.

So, in essence, public health officials are censoring the information that would help people make an informed choice, and then saying that parents and pediatricians can’t make an informed choice because they don’t have enough information about off-label pediatric vaccination.

Off-label prescribing is very common for kids, since many drugs are not approved for pediatric prescribing. Pediatricians know that “off label is not synonymous with off evidence” and it’s often worth it for doctors, parents, and patients to choose to use a drug in ways that differ from its approved use. But the FDA prohibits any drug marketing except for FDA-approved intended uses. This means that drug makers, like Pfizer, are prohibited from publicizing truthful information about the potential benefits of off-label prescribing, even when physicians and parents would benefit from knowing all of their options. 

Government restrictions on off-label marketing amount to content-based restrictions on speech that relates to lawful conduct. These restrictions are a form of government censorship that harms patients, physicians, and caregivers by keeping them in the dark about their medical options. With COVID-19, censoring information about off-label pediatric prescribing prevents parents and pediatricians from learning truthful information about the risks and benefits of vaccination from the people who are making the vaccines and running pediatric trials.

Off-label marketing restrictions are also plausibly unconstitutional. In the past decade, at least two federal courts have ruled that restrictions on non-misleading off-label promotion “run afoul of the First Amendment” and that this kind of marketing is not a form of misbranding. In both cases, the government did not appeal, allowing officials to avoid a Supreme Court case and thus leaving the current restrictions to remain largely unchallenged by risk-averse pharmaceutical companies. And while there is some indication that the government is no longer prosecuting people for providing truthful, non-misleading information, the government retains the right to do so and it has indicated that it will prosecute this kind of marketing if it poses a “public health concern.”

For off-label pediatric vaccines, these restrictions mean manufacturers cannot market pediatric vaccines by publicizing the preliminary results of their vaccine trials for younger patients. Many parents and pediatricians would have a strong interest in seeing preliminary data from the 7,000 trial participants before making a decision about off-label vaccination for kids, even if the FDA wants more data before expanding emergency or final approval to children.

Not only are manufacturers prohibited from publicizing information about off-label vaccination, public health officials are actively discouraging parents from pursuing off-label vaccination for their younger patients. Officials at the FDA discouraged pediatricians and parents from seeking off-label vaccination for their children until the FDA grants an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for one of the available vaccines. This recommendation is based on a lack of information about the vaccines’ risks to kids and optimal dosing. Yet parents and pediatricians lack this information and the people who have it are legally prohibited from publicizing it until the FDA grants an EUA.

Worse still, the CDC‘s provider agreement for health workers says that anyone providing off-label vaccinations to kids could lose access to vaccines and forfeit their legal immunity. This makes widespread pediatric off-label vaccination even less likely because off-label vaccine providers could face civil penalties associated with off-label vaccination and their patients may not be able to receive compensation from the federal government if they experience an adverse event associated with vaccination.

Some critics of off-label pediatric vaccination argue that the known risks of vaccines cannot justify off-label pediatric vaccination. Based on what we do know, there is some risk that vaccinating kids could slightly increase their risk of Myocarditis, a rare heart condition. But this argument overlooks the risks of failing to vaccinate children. According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, COVID-19 puts children at an even higher risk of Myocarditis.

Other critics of off-label pediatric vaccination argue that vaccines should be held to a higher standard of safety because they are given to children who are “perfectly healthy.” But with kids going back to school while the delta variant is still surging and cases are still rising, children are just one back-to-school outbreak away from becoming unhealthy and contagious COVID-19 patients.

For these reasons, many parents reasonably think that the risks of off-label pediatric vaccination do not exceed the risks of pediatric COVID-19 infection. But public health officials are actively obscuring information about pediatric vaccine risks and won’t let manufacturers publicize the information that pediatricians and parents need to make an informed choice.

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The Secret To Vaccinating Children: Off-Label Vaccinations


zumaglobaleleven093935

With the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19 granted full approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use on anyone ages 13 and up, pediatricians can actually now legally give it to patients under 12 years old, even though the drug is not yet technically approved for this age group. This is because once a drug is FDA approved, physicians can legally prescribe drugs off-label, beyond the scope of the drugs’ initial approval, if they judge that it is medically appropriate. Yet while some parents have successfully scheduled vaccines for their younger children, pediatric vaccination is likely to remain unavailable to most families even as children return to school in communities that are facing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases and pediatric hospitalizations are on the rise.

Pediatric vaccination is unlikely to become widely available for two reasons. First, FDA marketing restrictions prevent manufacturers from publicizing information about off-label vaccination for kids younger than 12. Second, public health authorities at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are discouraging off-label prescribing, citing a lack of data regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccines for younger patients, and many parents and providers follow the guidance of those officials.

So, in essence, public health officials are censoring the information that would help people make an informed choice, and then saying that parents and pediatricians can’t make an informed choice because they don’t have enough information about off-label pediatric vaccination.

Off-label prescribing is very common for kids, since many drugs are not approved for pediatric prescribing. Pediatricians know that “off label is not synonymous with off evidence” and it’s often worth it for doctors, parents, and patients to choose to use a drug in ways that differ from its approved use. But the FDA prohibits any drug marketing except for FDA-approved intended uses. This means that drug makers, like Pfizer, are prohibited from publicizing truthful information about the potential benefits of off-label prescribing, even when physicians and parents would benefit from knowing all of their options. 

Government restrictions on off-label marketing amount to content-based restrictions on speech that relates to lawful conduct. These restrictions are a form of government censorship that harms patients, physicians, and caregivers by keeping them in the dark about their medical options. With COVID-19, censoring information about off-label pediatric prescribing prevents parents and pediatricians from learning truthful information about the risks and benefits of vaccination from the people who are making the vaccines and running pediatric trials.

Off-label marketing restrictions are also plausibly unconstitutional. In the past decade, at least two federal courts have ruled that restrictions on non-misleading off-label promotion “run afoul of the First Amendment” and that this kind of marketing is not a form of misbranding. In both cases, the government did not appeal, allowing officials to avoid a Supreme Court case and thus leaving the current restrictions to remain largely unchallenged by risk-averse pharmaceutical companies. And while there is some indication that the government is no longer prosecuting people for providing truthful, non-misleading information, the government retains the right to do so and it has indicated that it will prosecute this kind of marketing if it poses a “public health concern.”

For off-label pediatric vaccines, these restrictions mean manufacturers cannot market pediatric vaccines by publicizing the preliminary results of their vaccine trials for younger patients. Many parents and pediatricians would have a strong interest in seeing preliminary data from the 7,000 trial participants before making a decision about off-label vaccination for kids, even if the FDA wants more data before expanding emergency or final approval to children.

Not only are manufacturers prohibited from publicizing information about off-label vaccination, public health officials are actively discouraging parents from pursuing off-label vaccination for their younger patients. Officials at the FDA discouraged pediatricians and parents from seeking off-label vaccination for their children until the FDA grants an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for one of the available vaccines. This recommendation is based on a lack of information about the vaccines’ risks to kids and optimal dosing. Yet parents and pediatricians lack this information and the people who have it are legally prohibited from publicizing it until the FDA grants an EUA.

Worse still, the CDC‘s provider agreement for health workers says that anyone providing off-label vaccinations to kids could lose access to vaccines and forfeit their legal immunity. This makes widespread pediatric off-label vaccination even less likely because off-label vaccine providers could face civil penalties associated with off-label vaccination and their patients may not be able to receive compensation from the federal government if they experience an adverse event associated with vaccination.

Some critics of off-label pediatric vaccination argue that the known risks of vaccines cannot justify off-label pediatric vaccination. Based on what we do know, there is some risk that vaccinating kids could slightly increase their risk of Myocarditis, a rare heart condition. But this argument overlooks the risks of failing to vaccinate children. According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, COVID-19 puts children at an even higher risk of Myocarditis.

Other critics of off-label pediatric vaccination argue that vaccines should be held to a higher standard of safety because they are given to children who are “perfectly healthy.” But with kids going back to school while the delta variant is still surging and cases are still rising, children are just one back-to-school outbreak away from becoming unhealthy and contagious COVID-19 patients.

For these reasons, many parents reasonably think that the risks of off-label pediatric vaccination do not exceed the risks of pediatric COVID-19 infection. But public health officials are actively obscuring information about pediatric vaccine risks and won’t let manufacturers publicize the information that pediatricians and parents need to make an informed choice.

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Here Are The Best And Worst Performing Assets In August

Here Are The Best And Worst Performing Assets In August

August proved to be a steady month for financial markets, as 21 of the 38 non-currency assets in Deutsche Bank’s sample closed in positive territory. As the bank strategist’s Henry Allen writes in his August Performance Review note, there were a number of factors helping to support risk appetite, which gave a lift to equities and high-yield credit, but the month also saw a number of key commodities lose ground, including oil for the first time since March. Otherwise it was pretty subdued though, with government bonds, credit and FX seeing little movement in either direction.

Starting at the top of the leaderboard, it’s clear that equities were the place to be in August, with various equity indices making up every one of the top 14 on the leaderboard last month. Those moves were propelled by a number of factors that proved supportive for investor risk appetite. First, Fed Chair Powell gave a dovish speech at Jackson Hole that calmed investor nerves about an imminent tapering of asset purchases. Second, the US jobs report for July that was released at the start of August showed nonfarm payrolls were up +943k, the strongest in 11 months, whilst the June number was also revised higher to show +938k growth. Third, there were further signs of progress on the Biden administration’s economic agenda, as the US Senate passed the bipartisan infrastructure package that includes $550bn of new spending over the next 8 years. And finally, concerns about the delta variant’s spread proved short-lived, with the number of new cases at the global level having plateaued and even showed signs of declining by the end of the month.

Given that backdrop, global equities advanced for a 7th consecutive month, with the S&P 500 (+3.0%) and the STOXX 600 (+2.2%) both recording further solid gains on a total returns basis. On the back of those gains in August, that means that both indices are now up by over +20% on a YTD basis in total return terms. In addition, financials recorded even stronger gains in August, with the S&P 500 financials up +5.1% last month, putting the index up +31.5% on a YTD basis.

Turning to commodities, oil remains the top performer in our sample on a YTD basis, with WTI up +41.2% since the start of the year, and Brent crude up +40.9%. However, for August alone, both WTI (-7.4%) and Brent Crude (-4.4%) experienced their first declines since March, as concern over slowing demand in China and the delta variant outweighed the supply shock caused by Hurricane Ida on production. Other commodities struggled as well, with silver (-6.3%) falling for a 3rd consecutive month, while copper was down -2.7%. And that poor performance from silver leaves it as the worst-performing asset in our main sample on a YTD basis, having lost -9.5% since the start of the year. A notable exception to the August decline in commodities was sugar however, which rose +10.8% in August, putting it up +28.1% YTD. As mentioned at the top, other asset classes were very subdued in August amidst a quiet period for financial markets. Government bonds saw modest declines, with Treasuries (-0.2%) experiencing their smallest move in either direction for over a year, whilst bunds (-0.5%), gilts (-0.8%) and OATs (-0.6%) fell back somewhat. On a YTD basis, all of the government bonds in our sample remain in negative territory though, as they still haven’t recovered fully from their losses in Q1 when the reflation theme was at its height.

Turning to FX, it was much the same story, with no massive movements in any of the major currency pairs, and the dollar index was up +0.5% over the month as a whole, thus slightly lifting its YTD gains to +3.0%. Finally in credit, HY outperformed in line with the broader increase in risk appetite, with USD, EUR and GBP HY continuing their run of having recorded a positive monthly performance in every month of 2021 so far.

Visually, this is how assets performed in August in both local currency and USD terms…

…. and here is the YTD data.

 

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/01/2021 – 15:11

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/38wDAA5 Tyler Durden

Taibbi: NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response

Taibbi: NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

John Stuart Mill, who was apparently not available for a recent On The Media panel

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

This was already an absurd and bizarre take, but what came next was worse. I was stunned by Marantz and Powell’s take on Brandenburg v. Ohio, our current legal standard for speech, which prevents the government from intervening except in cases of incitement to “imminent lawless action”:

MARANTZ: Neo-Nazi rhetoric about gassing Jews, that might inflict psychological harm on a Holocaust survivor, but as long as there’s no immediate incitement to physical violence, the government considers that protected… The village of Skokie tried to stop the Nazis from marching, but the ACLU took the case to the Supreme Court, and the court upheld the Nazis’ right to march.

POWELL: The speech absolutists try to say, “You can’t regulate speech…” Why? “Well, because it would harm the speaker. It would somehow truncate their expression and their self-determination.” And you say, okay, what’s the harm? “Well, the harm is, a psychological harm.” Wait a minute, I thought you said psychological harms did not count?

This is not remotely accurate as a description of what happened in Skokie. People like eventual ACLU chief Ira Glasser and lawyer David Goldberger had spent much of the sixties fighting for the civil rights movement. The entire justification of these activists and lawyers — Jewish activists and lawyers, incidentally, who despised what neo-Nazi plaintiff Frank Collin stood for — was based not upon a vague notion of preventing “psychological harm,” but on a desire to protect minority rights.

In fighting the battles of the civil rights movement, Glasser, Goldberger and others had repeatedly seen in the South tactics like the ones used by localities in and around Chicago with regard to those neo-Nazis, including such ostensibly “constitutional” ploys like requiring massive insurance bonds of would-be marchers and protesters.

Years later, Glasser would point to the efforts of Forsyth County, Georgia to prevent Atlanta city councilman and civil rights advocate Hosea Williams from marching there in 1987. “Do you want every little town to decide which speech is permitted?” Glasser asked. Anyone interested in hearing more should watch the documentary about the episode called Mighty Ira.

This was the essence of the ACLU’s argument, and it’s the same one made by people like Hugo Black and Benjamin Hooks and congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who said, “It is technically impossible to write an anti-speech code that cannot be twisted against speech nobody means to bar. It has been tried and tried and tried.”

The most important problem of speech regulation, as far as speech advocates have been concerned, has always been the identity of the people setting the rules. If there are going to be limits on speech, someone has to set those limits, which means some group is inherently going to wield extraordinary power over another. Speech rights are a political bulwark against such imbalances, defending the minority not only against government repression but against what Mill called “the tyranny of prevailing opinion.”

It’s unsurprising that NPR — whose tone these days is so precious and exclusive that five minutes of listening to any segment makes you feel like you’re wearing a cucumber mask at a Plaza spa — papers over this part of the equation, since it must seem a given to them that the intellectual vanguard setting limits would come from their audience. Who else is qualified?

By the end of the segment, Marantz and Gladstone seemed in cheerful agreement they’d demolished any arguments against “getting away from individual rights and the John Stuart Mill stuff.” They felt it more appropriate to embrace the thinking of a modern philosopher like Marantz favorite Richard Rorty, who believes in “replacing the whole framework” of society, which includes “not doing the individual rights thing anymore.”

It was all a near-perfect distillation of the pretensions of NPR’s current target audience, which clearly feels we’ve reached the blue-state version of the End of History, where all important truths are agreed upon, and there’s no longer need to indulge empty gestures to pluralism like the “marketplace of ideas.”

Mill ironically pointed out that “princes, or others who are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects.” Sound familiar? Yes, speech can be harmful, which is why journalists like me have always welcomed libel and incitement laws and myriad other restrictions, and why new rules will probably have to be concocted for some of the unique problems of the Internet age. But the most dangerous creatures in the speech landscape are always aristocrat know-it-alls who can’t wait to start scissoring out sections of the Bill of Rights. It’d be nice if public radio could find space for at least one voice willing to point that out.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/01/2021 – 14:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WKP9Rt Tyler Durden

AOC Slams Biden’s Decision To Nominate Rahm Emanuel To Ambassador Post

AOC Slams Biden’s Decision To Nominate Rahm Emanuel To Ambassador Post

AOC took a break from trying to sabotage Jerome Powell’s re-nomination as Fed chairman to issue a scathing statement attacking one of the sleaziest personalities to ever be associated with the Democratic Party: Rahm Emanuel, the former Mayor of Chicago, who has been nominated to become the next US ambassador to Japan.

In her statement, AOC slammed the Biden Administration for backing Emanuel, who infamously helped to cover up the police killing of unarmed teenager Laquan McDonald.

“This nomination is deeply shameful,” AOC said in the statement. “As mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald – a mere teenager when he was shot 16 times in the back by a Chicago Police Officer. This alone should be flatly disqualifying for any position of public trust, let alone representing the United States as an ambassador.”

Emmanuel was elected to Congress from Illinois’ 5th District after serving as a special advisor to President Bill Clinton. He later served as President Obama’s chief of staff during his first term, before leaving to return to his own political career. He was elected mayor of heavily Democratic Chicago in 2011.

n 2015, Emanuel was implicated in the alleged cover-up of the police shooting of McDonald after video revealed that the police department’s initial story was untrue. McDonald was walking away when he was shot by a Chicago police officer, who fired a barrage of 16 shots that continued even after he collapsed. That officer was convicted of murdering him and is serving a nearly seven-year sentence.

This incident further embittered American progressives toward Emmanuel. And now, the most popular progressive politician in America (judging by social media following) is doing everything in her power to make sure he never returns to a career in public service.

“That the Biden administration seeks to reward Emanuel with an ambassadorship is an embarrassment and betrayal of the values we seek to uphold both within our nation and around the world,” she said. “I urge the Senate to vote NO on his confirmation.”

We imagine that serving as an ambassador for the duration of the Biden Administration would be tantamount to a cushy retirement for Emmanuel, whose political star has fallen since leaving the mayor’s office in Chicago. Now, he might not even be able to manage that.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/01/2021 – 14:15

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Vc2BO8 Tyler Durden