We've heard this before, of course.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) — A 45-year-old man now living in the Bay Area may be the first person ever cured of the deadly disease AIDS, the result of the discovery of an apparent HIV immunity gene.

Timothy Ray Brown tested positive for HIV back in 1995, but has now entered scientific journals as the first man in world history to have that HIV virus completely eliminated from his body in what doctors call a “functional cure.”

Brown was living in Berlin, Germany back in 2007, dealing with HIV and leukemia, when scientists there gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant that had astounding results.

“I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any sense,” said Brown, who has been dubbed “The Berlin Patient” by the medical community.

What's so special about those stem cells? Possibly a genetic inheritance from the Black Plague:

Sceintists said Brown received stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV. In fact, about one percent of caucasians are immune to HIV. Some researchers think the immunity gene goes back to the Great Plague: people who survived the plague passed their immunity down and their heirs have it today.

I don't see it explicitly noted in the article but "bone marrow stem cells" indicate to me adult stem cells -- embryos don't have "bone marrow" or bones for that matter -- and so, yeah. Looks like this whole insistence on embryonic stem cells is a bit of political red herring.

On the other hand, if such cells, once identified, can cure major diseases (cancer?), there might be a push to mass-clone them, which means... creating a lot of embryos of the stem cells to produce them on an industrial scale.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (172)
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ConflictiN' iNtrests.

Spinning furiously for Fareed is one Howard Kurtz, who previously worked at CNN with a strong conflict of interest -- he was supposedly the Washington Post's media reporter, but he didn't have a conflict of interest also working for one of the organizations he was supposed to cover.

Why? Because we said so.

Zakaria maintained that all he’s done is “had a couple of conversations with the President, off-the-record. At no point did President Obama ask me for advice on a specific policy.” Apparently, “conversations” that are “off-the-record” do not constitute “advising.”

The next day, on Sunday’s Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz accepted Zakaria’s explanation and only offered a gentle reprimand for not making the meetings known. Kurtz relayed how Zakaria claimed “that the two meetings he's had with Obama in recent months give him a sense of the President's thinking, and that he used to have the same kinds of meetings with, for example, Condi Rice.”

Kurtz decided: “I agree with Fareed's last point, that part of what he's getting at the White House is high-level spin. That's why I think the fact of the meetings should have been disclosed. Zakaria says that's not part of the arrangement, but it should be. Otherwise, people will inevitably have doubts when word leaks out.”

I think we're getting high-level spin from Zakaria and Kurtz.

Previously Zakaria dropped any pretense of being a reporter and simply declared his endorsement of Barack Obama, at Newsweek:

John McCain represents the best of America's past, and Barack Obama the hope of the future -- the hope of a country that can make big changes and live out one of its greatest promises, of equal opportunities for all Americans, of every caste, creed and color. And America has always been a country that looks forward. So, I will be voting for Barack Obama on election day this year.

CNN's Jack Cafferty and Paula Zahn previously scolded FoxNews' Roger Ailes for writing private advisements to President Bush.

[CAFFERTY:] Woodward reports that the Fox News chief, Roger Ailes, has been secretly sending advice to President Bush and the senior aide, a guy named Karl Rove. Woodward writes that Ailes sent a confidential memo to Rove who then took it to the President. The Ailes memo reportedly said that the American public would be patient about Iraq, but only as long as they were convinced Bush was using the harshest measures possible. Ailes is also said to have warned that support would weaken if the public did not see Bush acting harshly. Roger Ailes was a media coach for President Bush's father and he's had a number of other assignments as well. Any comments?

PAULA ZAHN: Does that shed new light on "we report, you decide" Jack?

CAFFERTY: "Fair and balanced" [laughter] We better leave that alone.

Zakaria has the worst conflict of interest possible -- ego. If an egotistical, ambitious "reporter" thinks his opinions are being considered by the president (and no, I don't believe this was just the White House telling Zakaria stuff; I think they flattered him by asking advice), then he's flattered, and he thinks he's on the team, and therefore he is invested in His Team's success (or perception of such).

The acronym in espionage for compromising an agent in your favor is MICES, standing for money ideology coercion ego and sex. (Sometimes it's just MICE, since the sex is included in "coercion" and maybe "ego.") Almost everyone in the media is an agent for the Democratic party because of the ideology prong; some, like Zakaria, are compromised by ego as well.

It's called Pride of Authorship, CNN. Look it up. Everyone likes their own stuff.

Gee, no wonder Zakaria thinks that every move of Obama's is brilliant. Obama's got him thinking he's implementing the Zakaria Agenda for Success. Of course Zakaria approves of Zakaria.

Posted by: Ace at 11:53 AM | Comments (279)
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Hoh boy. We should have seen this coming. I didn't. I didn't read anyone predicting it.

The best solution, for conservatives and America, is to just spend less, of course.

But Democrats will never, ever do that.

So the first thing they do is raid the pension funds, because that's not current spending, and they figure that will be replaced.

Should have seen it coming. It's so liberal. Just keep borrowing and spending and taking money from one federal account to spend it for other purposes.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has warned for months that the government would soon hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling — a legal limit on how much it can borrow. With that limit reached Monday, Geithner is undertaking special measures in an effort to postpone the day when he will no longer have enough funds to pay all of the government’s bills.

Geithner, who has already suspended a program that helps state and local government manage their finances, will begin to borrow from retirement funds for federal workers. The measure wonÂ’t have an impact on retirees because the Treasury is legally required to reimburse the program.

The maneuver buys Geithner only a few months of time. If Congress does not vote by Aug. 2 to raise the debt limit, Geithner says the government is likely to default on some of its obligations...

Or we could just spend less, but of course that's not even a possibility.

There's a theory the liberals adopted in law. At some point it occurred to them that if the federal courts kept asserting power to interfere in state law, forcing them to be more liberal, than that same asserted power could be used against them one day, to force state law to become more conservative. Conservatives generally don't support that, as we don't think the federal government should overrule states generally, be we could support it. (Some do, actually.)

So, to avoid that possibility, they made up yet another double-standard "We can do this but you can't, just because" theory, called the "one-way ratchet theory." Like a one-way ratchet, courts can only overrule state legislatures in the direction of increasing liberality; the ratchet cannot go the other way, they say.

Because: ratchet.

Good to see the same sort of rule applies to the size of government and ever-growing mountain of government spending and debt.

I have to admit, liberals are at least consistent in their wild inconsistency.

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (233)
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Paul Ryan gave a major speech today to the Economic Club of Chicago. The title was "Shared Scarcity Versus Renewed Prosperity". As you can imagine from the title it was a mixture of some bracing economic truths and optimism that it's not too late to deal with them.

Ryan gets into some themes here I'd love to see more conservatives adopt. He talks about the danger increasing spending and the scope of government represents to liberty. He's not only sounding the fiscal alarm but calling on Americans to act in ways that we claim to admire (risk taking individualists) but is the opposite of how we actually vote (give me more and tax the other guy for it).

Whether or not we are willing to kick our addiction to 'free' government handouts and return to an entrepreneurial risk taking country isn't clear. Either way, we deserve to have the choice on the menu and Ryan is trying to put it there.

A longish excerpt.

In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy.

This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt – and that’s according to optimistic projections. If ratings agencies such as S&P move from downgrading our outlook to downgrading our credit, then interest rates will rise even higher, and debt service will cost trillions more.

This course is not sustainable. That isnÂ’t an opinion; itÂ’s a mathematical certainty. If we continue down our current path, we are walking right into the most preventable crisis in our nationÂ’s history.

So the question is, how do we avoid it?

The answer is simple. We have to make responsible choices today, so that our children donÂ’t have to make painful choices tomorrow.

If you look at whatÂ’s driving our debt, the explosive growth in spending is the result of health care costs spiraling out of control.

By the time my children are raising families of their own, literally every dollar we raise in revenue will be paying for three major entitlement programs.

Some of this is demographic – every day, ten thousand baby boomers retire and start collecting Medicare and Social Security.

But a lot of it is simply due to the fact that health care costs are rising faster than the economy is growing. Revenues simply cannot keep up.

It’s basic math – we cannot solve our fiscal or economic challenges unless we get health care costs under control.

The budget passed by the House last month takes credible steps to controlling health care costs. It aims to do two things: to put our budget on a path to balance, and to put our economy on a path to prosperity.

I am here today to stress the point that these goals go hand in hand. Stable government finances are essential to a growing economy, and economic growth is essential to balancing the budget.

The name of our budget is The Path to Prosperity.

See, right now, weÂ’re finally having a debate in Washington about how to address our fiscal problems. But weÂ’re still not having the debate we need to have.

To an alarming degree, the budget debate has degenerated into a game of green-eyeshade arithmetic, with many in Washington – including the President – demanding that we trade ephemeral spending restraints for large, permanent tax increases.

This sets up a debate in which we are really just arguing over who to hurt and how best to manage the decline of our nation. It is a framework that accepts ever-higher taxes and bureaucratically rationed health care as givens.

I call it the “shared scarcity” mentality. The missing ingredient is economic growth.

Shared scarcity represents a deeply pessimistic vision for the future of this country – one in which we all pay more and we all get less. I believe it would leave us with a nation that is less prosperous and less free.

To begin with, chasing ever-higher spending with ever-higher tax rates will decrease the number of makers in society and increase the number of takers. Able-bodied Americans will be discouraged from working and lulled into lives of complacency and dependency.

Worse – when it becomes obvious that taxing the rich doesn’t generate nearly enough revenue to cover Washington’s empty promises – austerity will be the only course left. A debt-fueled economic crisis will force massive tax increases on everyone and indiscriminate cuts on current beneficiaries – without giving them time to prepare or adjust. And, given the expansive growth of government, many of these critical decisions will fall to bureaucrats we didn’t elect.

Shared scarcity impedes economic growth, results in harsh austerity, and ends with lost freedom.

And what is his solution? more...

Posted by: DrewM at 10:40 AM | Comments (116)
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I still think that Obama has some kind of long-lasting small adjustment to his favorability. I think a president is the sum of his accomplishments and failures, and Obama now has exactly one accomplishment. Not enough to overcome all his myriad failures, but still, he's got one win where before he had none.

( If you doubt me, check out my 2 for 2 record on Huckabee and Trump. (I'm not retracting, I'm reloading.)

But it looks like any improvement for Obama will be so small that you can completely miss it.

Obama's approval rating is now at 46 percent, equal to his approval rating in the last tracking poll conducted before Obama addressed Americans late on May 1 and informed them of bin Laden's death. Forty-four percent of Americans now disapprove of the job Obama is doing as president.

According to the Gallup poll, Obama's approval rating crested at 52 percent after the bin Laden killing. His disapproval rating never fell lower than 40 percent.

Obama will run partly as a "foreign policy president," which is what presidents run as when they're failures on all things domestic. See George Bush the elder; see also John McCain who, while not a president, could not (or at least did not) point to any domestic policy hope and change and mostly ran as the guy who pushed Bush the younger to the right on Iraq.

That's usually not a strong pitch to the public.

Obama will also run, Howard Fineman guesses (probably correctly), as a "values" president, i.e., he has the same values of the average American citizen, such as destroying the economy, pilling up trillions in fresh debt, showing he's "business friendly" by practicing crony capitalism and thuggish coercive "capitalism," pushing the gay agenda, and other such bedrock American values.

But he has to run on those dubious values because his record isn't dubious so much as disastrous.

The Public Doesn't Like Endzone Dances, Either: Modestly funny SNL sketch poking some minor fun at Obama for now running on "a verb, a noun, and Osama bin Ladin," as Joe Biden might have said in 2008.

The funny parts are the two stand-up cliches. And they're just okay.

Posted by: Ace at 10:17 AM | Comments (144)
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According to this morning's LA Times, approximately 20% of their sample in a poll of the American electorate doesn't believe that Osama bin Laden is dead.

They seem to believe that this is indicative of the stupidity or incredulity of those who oppose the current president.

No word on the larger percentage of the electorate who believe 9/11 was an inside job. I guess they're not stupid...............they're "just asking questions".

How could so many presumably normal citizens (19%, according to Zogby) be so ignorant as to....

...not believe the claims of their duly-elected president and the detailed accounts by his deputies of the deadly dark-of-night raid deep into Pakistan by a team of Navy SEALs, the firefight and the flight with the corpse to an American carrier offshore, the confirmation of his DNA, the preparation of his body according to Muslim ritual and its hasty burial somewhere at sea to avoid creating a shrine?

All this within 12 hours?

Well, to be fair to the skeptics; it's not as if the raid on bin Laden was captured live on Fox/CNN/every major news outlet in North America, and witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers, Pentagon workers, and rural residents of Pennsylvania.

(edited to reflect that the LAT article I linked to doesn't actually call those who disbelieve The Official Story to be "stupid". They leave that to the comments section.)

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 09:36 AM | Comments (144)
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First Huck, now Trump passes on a run. Kind of sad when the best news for a party's presidential field is when people don't run.

Oh well. Small favors and all.

After considerable deliberation and reflection, I have decided not to pursue the office of the Presidency. This decision does not come easily or without regret; especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country. I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and ultimately, the general election. I have spent the past several months unofficially campaigning and recognize that running for public office cannot be done half heartedly. Ultimately, however, business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector.

Full statement here

His poling collapsed after Obama released his birth certificate but I think he didn't like the taste of politics he got. From getting smacked around at the White House Correspondents Association and the reaction to some of his speeches, I think he found politics wasn't a world he could simply bully around.

I honestly thought if he ran he'd wind up doing it as an independent like Ross Perot. Since that would only have helped Obama, I'm glad he's sticking to real estate and TV.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:48 AM | Comments (303)
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Yesterday the disgraced former Speaker of the House (yeah, that's how I think he should be referred to from no on) attacked Paul Ryan's budget and entitlement reform program as "right wing social-engineering" and "radical. Signing on to the Ryan plan isn't a requirement to win the nomination but a Republican and purported conservative shouldn't attack the plan in language that might make even a Democrat step by and blush a bit. Oh and if you're going to attack the one plan on the table, you need to have a plan better than suggesting "a national conversation" on our impending DOOM.

All of that would be bad enough except it turns out waaaayyyyy back in April of this year Gingrich said this about Ryan and his plan.

Bennett played a clip of an interview he conducted with Gingrich on April 5, barely more than a month ago. At that time, Gingrich was full of praise for the Ryan budget. "Paul Ryan has stepped up to the plate," Gingrich said. "This is a very, very serious budget and I think rivals with [what] John Kasich did as budget chairman in getting to a balanced budget in the 1990s, just for the scale and courage involvedÂ…"

"Paul Ryan is going to define modern conservatism at a serious level," Gingrich continued on April 5. "You can quibble over details but the general shape of what he's doing will define 2012 for Republicans."

Apparently in Newt's world savaging the Republicans main entitlement plan is simply a "quibble".

Let us not forget that Newt's commitment to positions on serious issues (not to mention the truth) can be, shall we say, situational. Remember how he was for the Libyan adventure before he was against it and that had a laughable explanation when he was caught flipping?

Yesterday, Allah disagreed with my characterization of Gingrich as "a loose cannon". He thinks Gingrich's attack on the Ryan plan was a calculated maneuver to curry favor with seniors, not a slip of the tongue. He's probably right about that but I don't think it has to be one or the other. My point is simply that Newt is going to shoot off his mouth and whether it's planned or not, you never know who he will hit. Very often, it's himself and his already thin credibility.

Update: Newt wants everyone to know he's opposed to ObamaCare and the national mandate.

As Ben Domenech points out, this puts Newt in the same camp as Mitt as far as state mandates go. So, there's that.

Also note...no walk back on the attacks on (not simple disagreement with) Ryan.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:44 AM | Comments (400)
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(Now that it's safely up, the video player is safely below the fold.) more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 04:55 AM | Comments (91)
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Today is the big day, Morons: our national credit-card is officially maxed out. Maybe it was that jet-ski or chrome wheels for the hoopty that put us over....

Over the weekend IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for sexual assault on a chambermaid in his New York City hotel. He was apprehended after he boarded a plane back to France. Strauss-Kahn was a leading contender for the presidency of France, so this news is proving to be a bit embarrassing for the French. Who knows what kind of disarray this will throw the IMF into -- and thus the pending bailouts of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal.

In the WSJ, Edward Lazear wonders why the job market feels so dismal.

We added jobs because hires exceeded separations, not because hiring increased. There were 4.7 million separations in February 2009. In March 2011 that number had fallen to 3.8 million. The fall in separations reflects a decline in layoffs, which went from 2.5 million per month in February 2009 to 1.6 million per month in March 2011. One small piece of good news is that the just-released April data showed hires up about 2% over last year's average and 12% above the low reached in January 2010.

Robert Samuelson posts a piece that will no doubt earn him the bitterness of many a retiree, "The Elderly Must Share the Financial Burden". Samuelson speaks with a bit more gravitas than I, since he is himself in his mid-60's. A good bit:

I have been urging higher eligibility ages and more means-testing for Social Security and Medicare for so long that I forget that many Americans still accept the outdated and propagandistic notion that old age automatically impoverishes people. Asks one reader: Who are these "well-off" elderly you keep writing about? The suggestion is that they are figments of my imagination, invented to justify harsh cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare on the needy.

Just the opposite. We see every day that many people in their 60s and older live comfortably - and still would if they received a little less in Social Security and paid a little more for Medicare. The trouble is that what's intuitively obvious becomes lost in the political debate; it's overwhelmed by selective and self-serving statistics that cast almost everyone over 65 as being on the edge of insolvency. The result: Government over-subsidizes the affluent elderly. It transfers resources from the struggling young to the secure old.

And more good stuff:

The problems of old age (chronic illness, outliving savings, loneliness) are real, but age by itself is not an indicator of need. The blanket defense of existing Social Security and Medicare isn't "liberal" or "progressive." It's simply a political expedient with ruinous consequences. It enlarges budget deficits and forces an unfair share of adjustment - higher taxes, lower spending - on workers and other government programs. This is the morality of the ballot box.

Our current entitlement programs are basically a financial war on the young. Sooner or later, they're going to fight back. The above article also presents a needed corrective to the myth of the "starving senior". Yes, many seniors live in poverty -- but percentage-wise, those unfortunates are a small fraction of the whole. Most seniors live quite comfortably, and can well afford a reduction in their government welfare checks.

Andrew Ross Sorkin of the NYT examines how an income of $250K apparently is enough to make one "rich".

Who boned California? Among others, the teachers. This is true of almost every state in the union, of course, but especially so in the members of the Loyal Order of the Terminally Boned (LOTB).

[UPDATE 1]: More on hitting the debt-ceiling from the IBD.

[UPDATE 2]: The tortured body will surrender.

[UPDATE 3]: Paul Ryan game-texts Newt on XBox Live: LOL NEWTON U SUQ TEAM RYAN ROXXORZ C U L8R H8R.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:42 AM | Comments (79)
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