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Sunday, January 25, 2004 |
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Washington Post: Tauzin Expected To Leave House For Trade Group: Lawmaker Declined Hollywood Job. Tauzin chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecommunications, media and entertainment industries. Most recently, however, he was one of the principal authors of the Medicare prescription drug bill that included several provisions expected to vastly expand the market for prescription drugs among the elderly. In addition to adding hundreds of billions of dollars for drug benefits, the law bars the federal government from directly bargaining down the price of drugs, a provision PhRMA pressed for.
Ethics and shame mean nothing to such people. Sadly, the law seems to allow this almost pure form of corruption.
Don't look for the congressional Democrats to object. They're part of this foul system. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
4:47:48 PM 
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There was a brief moment when the company's adoption of XML had potential -- to be a breakthrough in interoperabilty, a move away from the proprietary file formats that have been one of the major lock-in devices of the past decade. And Microsoft assured us that it wouldn't pull the same tricks this time. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
4:47:03 PM
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Samantha Marson, a 21 year old woman from Britain, was jailed in Miami after making a joke to an American customs official. The joke: "Hey be careful, I have three bombs in here," she quipped, as her carry-on luggage was screened. [Kuro5hin.org]
4:46:35 PM
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David Kay, the chief arms hunter in Iraq, resigns from his post Friday, saying he does not believe there are any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in the war-torn country. [Wired News]
2:59:07 AM
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The government's Can-Spam Act, which backers say will bring e-mail spam under control, is pilloried by California officials. All it has succeeded in doing is gutting much tougher state antispam measures, they say. [Wired News]
The lobbyists wrote the CAN-SPAM law, and the Congress-critters they feed were all too happy to pass it. In 6 months they're going to have to admit they did nothing, or worse than nothing, unless some fabulous technical solution bails them out.
2:58:52 AM
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© Copyright 2004 The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.
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