Despite Rupert Murdoch and the soft-porn tabloid dailies, ‘the spectrum of thought (in the British print media) ranges so wide that a progressive-minded American might be tempted to take up residence here.

In comparison, the leading “liberal” dailies across the Atlantic – the New York Times and the Washington Post – are mouthpieces of corporate power and U.S. empire. If the Times and the Post were being published in London, then British readers would consider those newspapers to be centrist or even conservative.’ AlterNet

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

Won’t you come to Sandymount,

Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

from ‘Proteus’ (Ulysses, chapter 3)

Class actions to end: “In the past, most class action suits were filed through state courts. In some of the better-known cases, against cigarette and later gun manufacturers, actions swept across states to become a tidal wave of litigation.

A case has recently been won in Madison, Illinois, against Philip Morris, where a judge awarded plaintiffs $12 billion after finding that the cigarette-maker failed to inform consumers that ‘light’ brands were no less harmful than full-tar cigarettes.

But the House of Representatives has voted by 253 to 170 to thwart the vast majority of class action suits in state courthouses, limiting all but the smallest claims to federal courts, where the big companies, say citizens’ groups, find it easier to delay the progress of suits and ‘shop’ for courts more favourable to their interests.” Guardian/Observer

If you are curious about how your representative voted, here’s the roll call. If you are curious about whom this will benefit, look no further than tto the fact that big business is jubilant about taking its business to the federal courts, the same ones the Republicans are packing with right-wing extremists even as they complain there is a partisan crisis in the judicial confirmation process. The GOP will talk all about tort reform, stopping giveaways to bottom-feeding lawyers (arguably the pot calling the kettle black, I would say, although trial lawyers are a perennial favorite GOP target.) and unclogging the courts of frivolous lawsuits, but the real agenda is clear and is of a piece with most of Bush’s domestic policy. Can you spell g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y? The Senate still has to approve this before it will become law. That’s the Republican-controlled Senate. Democrats: can you spell f-i-l-i-b-u-s-t-e-r (although several Democratic Senators have already lined up behind the bill)? And don’t even get me started on what the Bill Frist is trying to do to the cloture rule…

In one of the most successful efforts to rein in the fast-rising cost of Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor, states are limiting which drugs doctors can prescribe for Medicaid patients.

Two years ago, only three states had authorized the use of lists of preferred drugs for such patients; since then, 19 other states have done so, though not all their programs are up and running, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

(…)

Preferred drug lists steer doctors away from some of the most expensive drugs and toward different, less expensive ones that the state deems equally effective, a practice that many private insurance companies and employee health plans have adopted and that is being considered by Congress as part of a government-subsidized drug benefit for 40 million Medicare recipients. Such limits have persuaded pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost to states of some medicines. Doctors who want to deviate from the list must get prior approval, a process whose difficulty varies widely from state to state… NY Times

My state, Massachusetts, is phasing in these controls for MassHealth, its version of Medicaid, and dealing with the prior approval process is arduous enough that it is, within the first month, rapidly reshaping prescribing practices of myself and the colleagues with whom I am talking about the situation. It becomes essentially a case not of ‘preferred’ drugs but mandated ones.

Isn’t this good, you might ask? The cost-containment effort focuses on the impact on the pharmaceutical industry which, it is true, has a captive market for its newest and most expensive medications. But it is the Medicaid patients, not the companies, which are suffering from this regulation, which deprives them of significantly better medications and makes the cost criterion more important than the efficacy or tolerability one. The mental health medications are not at all the focus of the article — all about arthritis and gastroesophageal reflux — but, at least in Massachusetts, are a major focus of these Medicaid cost containment initiatives. As a psychopharmacologist, I can tell you that the list of mental health drugs a Medicaid patient will end up on is arbitrarily, ludicrously limited. We are rapidly moving toward a two-tier medical system in which those who are poor receive significantly poorer care with virtually no one speaking for them and for whom clinical factors have been virtually neutralized as the decisive factors in their physician’s prescribing choice.

The type of statistical studies showing that, across the population, drug X is as effective as drug Y for a given symptom or disease have nothing to say about the art of prescribing for the individual patient with his or her own unique physiology and treatment history, yet that type of study is the basis for the prescribing restrictions. Especially in mental health care, there has been an explosion in new drug development in the past two decades. While, as I have frequently written here, some of it has been motivated purely by the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to invent a new twist that will allow them to keep proprietary control over an innovation for the forseeable future, innovation it is — new drugs in the antidepressant, antipsychotic and mood stabilizer areas are truly significantly better, and patients on them feel better and do better than on the medications of a generation before whose toll on the body was often worse than the symptoms they were meant to treat. The new Medicaid restrictions do not, to be fair, roll us back all the way to the prior generation, but they do attempt to level the distinctions among the newer drugs, ignoring the subtleties that make for successful prescribing.

The solution, it seems to me, is for the states to take on the pharmaceutical industry and force concessions with respect to their pricing policy, which gouges us all, much in the way activists are going after the obscenity of big pharma’s profiteering on AIDS medications. Attempting to mandate a state-sponsored boycott of their most expensive products will not achieve this. It ends up being just another way in which this society, which should properly be judged by the way it cares for its most unfortunate and least able, comes up wanting.

Trailers were not WMD labs:

A British inquiry into two truck-trailers found in northern Iraq has found they are not mobile germ warfare labs, the Observer reported yesterday. Instead, they were for the production of hydrogen to fill weather balloons.

A British scientist and biological-weapons expert, who examined the trailers in Iraq, told the London-based weekly: “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories.

“You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were: facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”

The Observer reported the British sold Iraq an artillery-balloon system in 1987. Hydrogen-filled balloons, filled and launched from a mobile platform, are used for determining wind speed and direction at altitude to help in targeting artillery. The Globe and Mail [props to cs]