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Politics : THE VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (6107)	2/15/2004 5:56:05 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 6358

BUSINESS WORLD Democratic Enemies List Kerry's simple-minded populism shows his is a camaign about nothing. BY HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR. Saturday, February 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST If this column sounds like one four years ago, that's because Democrats are running against their usual list of "enemy" industries. The party's standard trope is that you're being denied things you need and deserve because enemies are keeping them from you, cheap drugs being today's case in point. Let's make sense of the industry once more for a Democratic presidential cadre now reaching a high pitch of populist dudgeon. There's a reason analysts, investors and pharmaceutical reps talk about a "pipeline." In one end goes a bunch of money, and out comes a dribble of products years later. The metaphor is also useful in understanding drug pricing. Whatever comes out the end, whether it's nose drops or a chemotherapy drug, is priced at whatever level will allow its maximum contribution to recouping all the money that went into the front end of the pipe. Abbott Labs demonstrated this effect when it recently raised the price of its aging AIDS drug, Norvir, by 400%. Activist groups were outraged, never mind that Abbott froze the old price in place for charity groups and continues to make the drug available at cost in developing countries. Abbott was accused of "greed." But wait? Wasn't it already stipulated that drug companies were maximally greedy? How could a change in Abbott's greed state account for a change in pricing strategy? In fact, Abbott was recently saluted by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation for making cheap drugs available in Africa. But Norvir, introduced in 1996, is no longer a drug of choice. Instead it's been relegated to a "booster" role in cocktail therapies consisting of new, higher-priced drugs from rival manufacturers (though much of the therapeutic benefit actually comes from combining their pricey products with cheap Norvir). Abbott saw other drug makers generating large revenues from its drug and is attempting to tilt more of the revenue flow from treating AIDS back to itself. Other companies will respond by cutting their own prices a bit to maintain market share and maximize their own revenues. Which goes to show what a competitive market AIDS drugs are, with 12 essential medicines now on the World Health Organization list. Drug companies are in the business of funding large R&D establishments, which typically account for a bigger share of total costs than manufacturing and distribution. That's why companies can charge high prices to rich, insured Westerners and next to nothing to poor Africans--because any price that's even a penny above current manufacturing cost produces at least some revenue to support the research bill. Now we come to the politics. It's tempting to say in these circumstances, "Hey, we can mandate lower prices for Medicare, treating American retirees the way we treat AIDS sufferers in Africa, because drug companies will keep making and selling drugs even at a much lower price as long as it's higher than current manufacturing costs." That's right, and the price of drug company stocks will crash instantly, and no more capital will be available to research new products. This is not really hard to understand, and certainly our Ivy League-educated Democratic presidential candidates can understand it. Were any of them to land in office, you can bet their threats against the drug industry would be quickly filed away in a circular keeping place until the next election. President Kerry wouldn't want to bear the political cost of its collapsing stock values, massive layoffs and the media reporting the folding up of research into cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. If this were only Mr. Kerry's problem we might wonder about the IQ behind his campaign rhetoric. Instead we are forced to wonder about the contempt nearly the whole Democratic field seems to feel for the Democratic base. No demagogue, left or right, fails to present himself as champion of the great, victimized majority against some tiny and exploitive elite. This argument is convenient for two reasons. Difficult issues like health-care financing, involving real tensions between hard-to-reconcile goals, can be reduced to utmost simplicity: On one side are the legitimate claims of voters who want cheaper drugs or whatever; on the other are the illegitimate claims of those who "stand in the way." Populist claptrap serves another purpose, visible on the very persons of the candidates: They swell with confidence and invulnerability when posing as defenders of the "little guy" rather than as champions of the party's own array of special interests and voting blocs (which is what they are). The force really at work is fear--fear on the part of Democratic leaders that they have nothing to offer; fear that their party's captivity by groups tied to existing programs forecloses any chance of innovative thinking. Notice that the party did not even wait for eight years of unrivaled Clinton prosperity to expire before Al Gore, in a panic, reverted to what a Washington Post editorial called "primitive business bashing" as a substitute for saying what some Democratic lobby group somewhere wouldn't like. Notice what a miserable disappointment even Howard Dean has been in this regard. Notice, too, the wonder of John Kerry, an asterisk six weeks ago, who reached his present eminence based on the repetition of meaningless phrases: "I know something about aircraft carriers for real." "Bring it on." "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." There is, literally, nothing else to the Kerry campaign. He's the default option of Democratic voters after the amazing rise and fall of Howard Dean, with the mother of all buyer's remorse coming down the pike about a minute or two behind. That's too bad but as a party they asked for it--and will keep doing so until they stop relying on the mindless naming of "villains" in place of dealing honestly with the voters whom they claim to represent. Mr. Jenkins is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal on Wednesdays. He is also editor of OpinionJournal's Political Diary, a new premium e-mail service. Click here for subscription information and sample columns.

To: calgal who wrote (6107)	2/15/2004 5:57:02 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6358

Hating FOX Brent Bozell (archive) February 6, 2004 \| Print \| Send The dominance of Fox News in the cable news ratings -- and what liberals see as its annoying tendency to cover topics and angles that they believe should be buried for the good of liberalism -- has led to a great amount of Fox-hating in the anything-but-"mainstream" press. These liberal elites love to pretend that the patch of dirt where they stand is the hallowed ground of objectivity, when in reality, their idea of "mainstream" is floating out on a liberal sea, on a fanciful boat where everyone thinks Howard Dean is best classified as a political moderate, as were McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis. As, one is meant to believe, are they. From their vantage point, which is nowhere within boom-microphone distance of the center, Fox News Channel must look like Right-Wing Kooksville. Unique in standing to the right of the ossified liberal media establishment, Fox is now regularly disparaged as the only ideological news media outlet in the United States. The rest of them are all, to use Dan Rather's self-description, "common-sense moderates." Anyone with his feet grounded in reality realizes that in fact Fox is fairer and closer to the American center than any of the liberal outlets. Pick an issue -- global warming, taxes, homosexuality -- and Fox demonstrates the temerity to allow both sides to debate, whereas other networks still pretend that only one reasonable, quotable side exists. No wonder their audience numbers are sliding as Fox continues to climb. The latest sad anti-Fox outburst came when the National Press Foundation decided to honor respected Fox news hound Brit Hume with its "Broadcaster of the Year" award, Geneva Overholser, a former ombudsman of the Washington Post and a whining liberal windbag if there ever was one, resigned in protest since she felt Hume and Fox practice "ideologically committed journalism." How controversial was the Hume selection? Consider the previous winners of this award: "moderate" Dan Rather, fired New York Times editor Howell Raines, loopy leftist Ted Turner, tiresome PBS propagandist Ken Burns, and NPR bias legend Nina Totenberg, who tried to destroy conservative hero Clarence Thomas with phony-baloney sexual allegations and wished AIDS on conservative hero Jesse Helms in a TV appearance. No one, including Overholser, resigned over any of them. But wait, there's even more phoniness in this take-my-ball-and-go-home protest. In the Nov. 28, 1992, edition of Editor & Publisher magazine, Overholser complained that there wasn't enough ideologically committed journalism out there. "All too often, a story free of any taint of personal opinion is a story with all the juice sucked out. A big piece of why so much news copy today is boring as hell is this objectivity god," she complained. "Keeping opinion out of the story too often means being a fancy stenographer." I saw this riotous act up close on a C-SPAN set a few years ago, as Ms. Overholser sat across the table from me and announced with a straight face and a calm voice that the Washington Post was committed to "presenting the news in a straightforward manner," while the Washington Times was only committed to "representing the conservative viewpoint." Fox News is routinely disparaged by the Left as a hard-swinging right-wing channel because of its top attractions. Populist maverick Bill O'Reilly is not reliably conservative but is regularly rebellious about liberal pieties. Then there's Sean Hannity, who is so packed with persuasive power that liberals never seem to notice he has a liberal co-host sitting across from him every night. Neither is a news reporter, thus rendering the liberal complain moot. But that won't stop the whining. Lost in the rage at the prime-time lineup is the performance of Brit Hume, who brought all the heft of his years of fairness covering Washington and politics at ABC to Fox's table. "Fair and balanced" are not silly marketing words to describe Hume. He earned an "A" from the Media Research Center for even-handed coverage of the Iraq war. But we're not alone. The radical left has trouble complaining about Hume, too. A report by the anti-Iraq-liberation media critics at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting put Hume in the middle in its guest selection: It "had fewer U.S. officials than CBS (70 percent) and more U.S. anti-war guests (3 percent) than PBS or CBS." FAIR's definition of "anti-war" may be ridiculously narrow (in their odd attempt to making liberal networks look conservative), but even FAIR credited Hume's show for giving air time to save-Saddam lobbyists like Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Fortney Stark. So credit should be granted to the National Press Foundation for having the courage to resist the Fox-haters and honor Hume's easily recognized professionalism. And shame should be awarded to Geneva Overholser, who, by her actions, is telling the world she doesn't have an honest bone in her liberal-activist body. Brent Bozell is President of Media Research Center, a Townhall.com member group. ©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.