RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/19/the-fda-needs-bold-reforms-instead-of-kicking-the-can-down-the-road/

When Dr. Robert Califf was selected by President Joe Biden for a second stint as Food and Drug Administration commissioner, we called it a safe but uninspired choice. Unfortunately, we have been proven right.

Califf is a distinguished academic cardiologist who specializes in clinical trial design, but the day-to-day regulatory decision-making happens at organizational levels below the commissioner, and he seems unwilling to engage with them. He has also made it clear that he’s not interested in criticism from the public, even though the FDA is required by law to consider public comments as part of the rulemaking process.

Dr. Califf did give some reason for hope last summer when he commissioned a review of the agency’s food and tobacco regulatory programs. We suspected that the report, prepared by the Reagan-Udall Foundation, would be a whitewash. But we are pleased to say we were partly wrong.

On the food front, the report echoed criticism from members of Congress, industry and public interest groups that there isn’t a single chain of command among various human food oversight offices, including the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and the Office of Food Policy and Response.

Now, a diverse group of stakeholders is unhappy with the reorganization plan the FDA announced in January and fleshed out further in late February, because it doesn’t fully integrate the all-important food inspection work into the new Human Foods program. 

At a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing in March, Frank Yiannas, who resigned earlier this year as the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food policy, testified that the agency’s ability to protect food safety is hindered by staff turnover, a siloed culture, and a lack of decision-making power. Roberta Wagner, the Consumer Brands Association’s vice president of regulatory and technical affairs, noted that an external study of the FDA has found the agency’s food regulation suffers from “constant turmoil” and “little motivation.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/19/signs-of-the-great-divorce-2-6-million-fled-counties-that-voted-for-biden-since-2020/

Is the country separating itself into two distinct camps? One increasingly leftist and the other trying desperately to cling to traditional American values? Census data seem to show that it very well could be underway.

Last week, we commented on recent population data showing that people have been fleeing urban areas, noting that these are mostly Democratically controlled, and we’ve pointed out that people have also been moving from red states to blue.

But we wanted to go deeper and get more precise numbers. So, we matched Census net migration data from mid-2020 through mid-2022 for all the nation’s 3,000-plus counties (or their equivalents) and compared that with how these counties voted in 2020. Our working assumption is that the results of the incredibly divisive 2020 election would be a good barometer of the devoutly held political views in those counties. 

What we found was striking: There has been a vast migration out of counties that voted for Joe Biden into those counties that voted to reelect Donald Trump.

Census data show a net internal migration of almost 2.6 million (2,584,459 to be exact) from blue counties to red since Biden was elected. (These figures don’t count immigrants or births or deaths, just those Americans moving from one location to another.)

More than 61% of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65% of Trump-supporting counties gained population.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/collateral-damage-of-a-smear-campaign-harlan-crow-clarence-thomas-texas-real-estate-americana-discourse-interview-75c89213?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

American politics lately feels like an endless game of—pardon the infelicitous word—delegitimation. The aim isn’t to convince voters that a political adversary is wrong or misguided, or even that he’s stupid or lying. It’s to assure the like-minded that he has no legitimate place in the public square and to drive him out if possible. 

The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness; the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes. 

The politics of delegitimation arose on the political left, an inheritance of 20th-century collectivist ideologies that saw no legitimacy in the liberal capitalist regimes they aimed to overthrow. But sizable segments of the American right now indulge in it, too. Donald Trump rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate. Mr. Trump’s claims that Mexican-American judges have no right to rule against him, or that President Biden’s election was fraudulent, may be false. But they aren’t unique. 

The impulse to delegitimate is at its ugliest any time a Republican president nominates a judge to the Supreme Court. During their confirmation hearings all of the current court’s conservative justices, with the partial exception of John Roberts, were accused of engaging in disreputable behavior or of holding opinions so bizarre and regressive as to disqualify them from service. In the stated views of their critics, these judges weren’t just wrong; they were bad.

Now that the court’s conservatives have a tenuous 6-3 majority despite the efforts of their defamers, the work of delegitimation has broadened to sitting justices and the court itself. Some recent headlines: “Supreme Court Term Begins Amid Questions about Its Legitimacy” (Washington Post), “Is the Supreme Court Facing a Legitimacy Crisis?” (New York Times), “The Supreme Court Is Fighting Over Its Own Legitimacy” (CNN). These and similar stories are manifestly intended to precipitate the “legitimacy crisis” they pretend to report.