As for giving the cops “multicultural training,” to hell with that. There’s nothing special about the way police should treat gays and lesbians. Like everyone else, we just need for the cops to be reminded occasionally that they’re peace officers, and not an occupying force in a foreign land.

Nassim Taleb is right: The economy isn’t going to get better; it’s going to get worse, a lot worse.

This is fishy:

Officers then went to the Rainbow Lounge, which had opened about a week ago. They encountered two drunk people who made “sexually explicit movements” toward officers and another who grabbed a TABC agent’s groin, according to the police report.

That sounds like the unimaginative fabrication of prole males in need of a fast excuse. But here’s the giveaway:

No one was arrested for assault but about half a dozen people were arrested on charges of public intoxication, according to police records.

Uh, no. If you so much as lay a hand on a law enforcement agent, much less grab at his crotch, in what state do you not get charged with assault?

Chad Gibson, the alleged grabber, is in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage:

Police Chief Jeff Halstead said Gibson was the patron who grabbed at the agent’s groin. Gibson was so drunk he was vomiting and struck his head when he fell, the chief said.

So, on the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the police raid a gay bar where they encounter a man who was not only audacious, but also vomitive. What an unusual confluence of events! (I know that when I happen upon people who are hurling chunks, I like to stand close enough to them that they can grab my crotch! Don’t you?)

We all know that people can drink themselves sick. But as an RN, I’ll tell you what else vomiting is a sign of: a hemorrhage that results from blunt force trauma to the head.

I don’t know what happened in that bar. I just know the cops’ story is suspicious.

The U.S. is unique because it alone is the source of half of world-wide profits that provide the payoff for the complex, lengthy, and expensive process of developing new treatments. When other nations construct their health-care systems, they ignore the impact of their pricing policies on R&D incentives. As the dominant R&D funding wellhead, we do not have that option.

From the syllabus of the court’s opinion:

The historic accomplishments of the Voting Rights Act are undeniable, but the Act now raises serious constitutional concerns. The preclearance requirement represents an intrusion into areas of state and local responsibility that is otherwise unfamiliar to our federal system.

Some media reported that the court had divided 8 to 1. That’s true, but misleading. The dissenter (and he dissented only in part) was Justice Clarence Thomas, who did not want to wait for Congress to act. He would have gone ahead and invalidated the law now.

SCOTUSBlog provides an excellent summary of the case and its significance.

The disparity results from Medicare-driven compensation that pays more to doctors who do procedures than to those who diagnose illness and dispense prescriptions. In 2005, for example, Medicare paid $89.64 for a half-hour visit to a primary-care doctor in Chicago, according to a Government Accountability Office report. It paid $422.90 to a gastroenterologist who spent about the same amount of time performing a colonoscopy in a private office.

Meanwhile, in Boston, where people are under a mandate to have health insurance, it takes an average of 63 days to get an appointment with a primary care doctor.