The activist group Public Citizen Tuesday asked the secretaries of Defense and Health and Human Services to investigate the deaths of two people who received platelet transfusions contaminated with bacteria at the National Institutes of Health’s research hospital last summer. The transfusions caused infection, shock and multiple-organ failure in cancer patients with compromised immune systems. One died a month later, the other six weeks later, according to a letter sent by Sidney M. Wolfe, the physician who heads Public Citizen’s Health Research Group . Read full article > >

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Activist group seeks investigation of NIH deaths

Julian Sanchez follows up on our previous discussions : We’d probably have more productive conversations if we just agreed that its not hugely useful to ask whether someone like Haley Barbour “is” a “racist,” or to reflexively read that accusation into every criticism involving race. Then we could focus more narrowly on what ought to be a relatively uncontroversial proposition: That his misguidedly sanguine view of the Citizen’s Councils reflects a lamentable (and perhaps self-serving) ignorance of the uglier aspects of his own state’s history, and that we should expect our elected officials to be better informed. This is exactly right. But I’ve come to believe that reason this doesn’t happen is quite simple–deploying the racist card is not a misunderstanding, it’s an act of intellectual dishonesty. There are some conservative and liberal places where writers and commenters genuinely disagree. But there are many more where they are just playing out loyalties. 

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The Racist Card

As we prepare yet another round of offerings to the demigods of America’s political religion, we would do well to remind ourselves of what our electoral votives truly signify. Ideally, our ballots purport to be expressions of political will, which we hope and pray will be translated into legislative and executive action by our pretended representatives. Through hard and painful struggles, against daunting odds, our forebears and elders fought so long for voting rights—for unpropertied men, for women, for blacks—that we may perhaps be forgiven the error of thinking that casting a ballot is the perfection of civic virtue, the ultimate and sovereign duty of the citizen-ruler. Alas, the agony of citizenship is never ending; voting is the beginning of civic virtue, not its end, and as suffrage has expanded so has its value been steadily debased. The locus of real power is elsewhere. Wealth and property qualifications, poll taxes, and the like are very far from being historical curiosities; they have simply mutated. Campaign contributions and other forms of political spending have assumed that old exclusionary function, and only those who can afford to pay are able truly to manifest their political will. Voters still “matter,” of course, but only as raw material to be shaped by the actual form of political influence—money—which molds the body politic by realizing itself in the ductile mass of common voters. . . .

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ROGER D. HODGE—Speak, money

Looks like The Social Network still has plenty of friends. The film about the origins of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg is garnering plenty of Oscar chatter and comparisons to Citizen Kane and won the Hollywood box office battle in its second…

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The Social Network Reigns Again