Dick Cheney is on a whirlwind tour trying to justify the Bush Administration’s record on the War on Terror, especially their decision to torture detainees. Mostly he is trumpeting intelligence gleaned from a supposedly high-level al Qaeda operative who was held and tortured at Guantanamo. Meanwhile his critics are countering his claims, noting [...]

As far as I can tell, most of the problems with the American pharmaceutical system are demonstrated by the case of a new drug that’s just hitting the market: Treximet.
The story of Treximet begins awhile back with the introduction awhile back of Imitrex by GlaxoKlineSmith. Imitrex (active ingredient: sumatriptan) that GKS introduced awhile back [...]

There is an extremely interesting (albeit long) article in the upcoming New York Times Magazine (they post their lead articles online a few days before the magazine itself comes out) about noted scientist and global warming skeptic, Freemon Dyson. The article makes note of the fact that Dyson is widely considered to be one [...]

Here’s a question for the audience to ponder: to what extent is the belief that “men shouldn’t hit their wives (girlfriends/children/etc.)” a sexist notion?
I bring this up because domestic violence is once again in the news the last couple of weeks, with the Chris Brown assault on his girlfriend, Rihanna. Brown is an R&B [...]

Check out this article, describing two recently published studies on the effectiveness of a common type of prostate screenings. The gist is that blood exams that look for prostate cancer don’t actually prolong the lives of even at-risk men, on average. In other words, this type of prostate screening may be a large [...]

I’ve said before that for-profit insurance is an awful idea. Companies that run insurance pools have incentives to keep as much money in the pool as possible at all times, because it is off of that money that they make their profits. In practice, that can mean delaying or denying legitimate claims, forbidding [...]

I’m a big fan of scrabble. But one thing I’m not a big fan of is the pseudo words that have made their way into the scrabble dictionary. These words take a lot of the fun out of the game, and make it more about memorizing lists of obscure words (not even knowing [...]

The new, and already embattled, GOP Chairman Michael Steele just put his foot in a hornet’s nest. In an interview with GQ Magazine, Steele seemed to take a pro-choice position:

I would like to start by stating my fervent opposition to the new ban on ice cream that conservative pundits are advocating. Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol, and it won’t work with ice cream. The ice cream industry is a boon to the American economy, generating nearly $20 billion dollars in taxable sales, [...]

The EPA has just proposed a rule that would require medium and large companies in a variety of industries to report their emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. This would allow the EPA to better track who is polluting and where. It’s a fabulous idea. It’s such a wonderful, not to [...]