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The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder uses the kerfuffle over Gov. Bob McDonnell’s recent proclamation gaffe as the spark for a surprisingly skin-color focused rant — blaming “light skinned, pasty, pudgy — pink skin color” Republican insiders for the fault. He calls them “the pinks.”

I was a bit shocked to read this kind of attack on the florid faced, especially from Ambinder, who typically comes across as a very even-keeled sort. Defining people by their skin color went out of style a long time ago, but that’s just what Ambinder does: (emphasis mine)

Consider this term: “the pinks.” It’s a new term that I’ve heard some weary Republicans use to refer to the party’s professional political class. Light-skinned, pasty, pudgy — pink skin color — the hacks, the enablers. Republicans with limited fields of view; Republicans with little imagination; Republicans who are obsessed with trying to figure out the complexities of their base and who can’t think beyond the immediate moment, even when they’re trying to think about future actions. McDonnell’s close circle of advisers may or not be pinks, but they’re not a terribly diverse lot, intellectually, ethnically, or otherwise.

Ambinder goes on to cite a few names from McDonnell’s inner campaign circle, while being careful not to accuse them directly of being “pinks.” But politics and policy are not the same things. Since taking office, McDonnell has built a crew of senior advisers notable for its diversity, as the Washington Post cited, including four women, two African Americans, one Hispanic and one Asian American (as always, the caveat that a family member is among that number). But let’s not play numbers games — the accusation that there’s a lack of intellectual diversity is the one that doesn’t pass the laugh test. McDonnell’s policy advisers are overwhelmingly political pragmatists, with little in the way of partisan background — he disappointed several leaders on the right by hewing to a moderate stance in his appointments, including re-naming two of Democrat Tim Kaine’s cabinet members.

As WaPo notes:

Indeed, some conservative activists who had been lobbying McDonnell to pick one of their own complain that the Cabinet does not reflect their views on social and other issues. They are already questioning what it will mean for the way McDonnell governs.

Yet it’s apparent Ambinder means McDonnell’s political advisers, not McDonnell’s staff (though if he’s contending political advisers have anything to do with issuing proclamations, I’d like to know why). But the insiders of the past are notably absent from McDonnell’s circle, and even for the few who are there, the term “the pinks” has never been used to describe them, either in the press or in Richmond political circles. If it were, I’m sure it would be widely rejected, not so much for its use of skin color as a definition as for its blatant inaccuracy — it sounds more like a slogan suggested by a Northern Virginian with views of Southern political insiders gained primarily from schtick television.

Perhaps aware that his label was not commonly known, Ambinder quickly credited the term on Twitter to a conservative twitterer, Tony Lee, who writes occasionally at Virginia Tomorrow and is working on three books. I don’t know Mr. Lee, or what experience he had that would cause him to use such a label, but in any case, Ambinder’s use of “some weary Republicans” seems a bit of an exaggeration if it’s actually just “a twitterer.”

There was one last point that stuck out from Ambinder’s piece, as the kind of toss-off line that really deserves a bit more consideration:

Virginia Republicans will be held to a higher standard on racial issues, as perhaps they should be.

Than Virginia Democrats? Why? If the answer is George Allen’s use of an obscure slur and a proclamation gaffe, I’d suggest Ambinder familiarize himself with the Byrd Organization and the decades of Virginia Democrat machine politics built almost entirely on racial gamesmanship:

Byrd became one of the most vocal proponents of maintaining policies of racial segregation. Byrd authored and signed the “Southern Manifesto” condemning the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. His call for “massive resistance” against desegregation of public schools led to many Virginia schools closing rather than be forced to integrate. His leadership in state politics led to closure of some public school systems in Virginia between 1959 and 1964, most notably a five year gap in public education in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

The suggestion that racial insensitivity is the property of one party is something only a partisan hack would contend, and the assumption that a pink-faced Republican is automatically a racist or a bigot (or one who seeks to send dog-whistle signals to neo-Confederates) is a blatant smear.

Personally, I just wonder if Ambinder blames “the pinks” for Jimmy Carter’s similar gaffe?

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Megan McArdle, Business Editor of The Atlantic and one of the most prolific free-market bloggers out there, had an interesting and lengthy post yesterday about her reasons for opposing national health care. It’s worth reading, and several of her points are well-made — which is probably why it was linked far and wide today, and is currently the top read story at RealClearPolitics. But McArdle also bases a portion of her argument on a surprisingly inaccurate depiction of the way medical research happens, one that needs rebutting if we’re going to keep the debate about reform of both the industry and the insurance side of health care based on facts about how the current system works, not polemics.

Starting at the sixth paragraph of her piece, McArdle launches into a description of the drug research process that is based on contrasting the tasks and goals of the National Institutes of Health and Pharma, starting from her premise that “Monopolies are not innovative, whether they are public or private.”

Advocates of this policy have a number of rejoinders to this, notably that NIH funding is responsible for a lot of innovation. This is true, but theoretical innovation is not the same thing as product innovation. We tend to think of innovation as a matter of a mad scientist somewhere making a Brilliant Discovery!!! but in fact, innovation is more often a matter of small steps towards perfection. Wal-Mart’s revolution in supply chain management has been one of the most powerful factors influencing American productivity in recent decades. Yes, it was enabled by the computer revolution–but computers, by themselves, did not give Wal-Mart the idea of treating trucks like mobile warehouses, much less the expertise to do it.

In the case of pharma, what an NIH or academic researcher does is very, very different from what a pharma researcher does. They are no more interchangeable than theoretical physicists and civil engineers. An academic identifies targets. A pharma researcher finds out whether those targets can be activated with a molecule. Then he finds out whether that molecule can be made to reach the target. Is it small enough to be orally dosed? (Unless the disease you’re after is fairly fatal, inability to orally dose is pretty much a drug-killer). Can it be made reliably? Can it be made cost-effectively? Can you scale production? It’s not a viable drug if it takes one guy three weeks with a bunsen burner to knock out 3 doses.

She goes on at length from there, and I’d encourage you to read it all for context’s sake. But needless to say, this passage and the ones following it surprised me a great deal. Working at the Department of Health and Human Services provided me the opportunity to learn a good deal about the workings of the NIH, and I happen to have multiple friends who still work there — and their shocked reaction to McArdle’s description was stronger than mine, to say the least.

“McArdle clearly doesn’t understand what she’s writing about,” one former NIH colleague said today. “Where does she think Nobel prize winners in biomedical research originate, academic researchers or in Pharma? Our academic researchers run clinical trials and develop drugs. I’m not trying to talk down Pharma, which I’m a big fan of, but I don’t think anyone in the field could read what she wrote without laughing.”

To understand how research is divided overall, consider it as three tranches: basic, translational, and clinical. Basic is research at the molecular level to understand how things work; translational research takes basic findings and tries to find applications for those findings in a clinical setting; and clinical research takes the translational findings and produces procedures, drugs, and equipment for use by and on patients.

Pharma operates under a great deal of pressure these days, and not just from the political side — everyone wants to avoid being left holding the next Vioxx. But as a matter of focus, their only area of interest is that last category: clinical research. What’s more, they’re only really interested in clinical research into areas that hold the promise of recouping the cost of their investment, and more. They are a business, and they perform as one.

As a side note: If you want to understand why in 1998 the medical community suddenly decided that you were overweight at a body mass index of 25 instead of 27.8, taking the WHO view (based on the BMIs of Africa and other developing nations as opposed to the long-held U.S. definition) and suddenly making 30 million Americans “fat,” just look at the makeup of the advisory panel — Pharma pushed this decision through, which had the effect of instantly adding millions of customers. But again, it’s nothing personal, just business.

So Pharma is interested in making money as their primary goal — that should surprise no one. But they’re also interested in avoiding litigation. Suppose for a moment that Pharma produces a drug to treat one non-life threatening condition, and it’s a monetary success, earning profits measured in billions of dollars. But then one of their researchers discovers it might have other applications, including life-saving ones. Instead of starting on research, Pharma will stand pat. Why? Because it doesn’t make any business sense to go through an entire FDA approval process and a round of clinical trials all over again, and at the end of the day, they could just be needlessly jeopardizing the success of a multi-billion dollar drug. It makes business sense to just stand with what works perfectly fine for the larger population, not try to cure a more focused and more deadly condition.

The truth, as anyone knowledgeable within the system will tell you, is that private companies just don’t do basic research. They do productization research, and only for well-known medical conditions that have a lot of commercial value to solve. The government funds nearly everything else, whether it’s done by government scientists or by academic scientists whose work is funded overwhelmingly by government grants.

It’s just simple math: if you have a condition that has a relatively small number of patients, there’s just no market incentive to sink a great deal of time and money into researching it. This is why you’ll usually find that 100% — not a majority, the entirety — of the research into a cure is done either via taxpayer-funded grants to academic researchers or, more frequently, it’s entirely found on the NIH campus.

Organ transplantation? Just about 100% is funded by NIH. Low prevalence cancers, or cancers with low survival rates? Just about 100% of all three phases is funded by NIH. You start to understand how this works.

“The innovation argument McArdle makes is silly because it presupposes that the government actually controls the research direction,” says my NIH friend. “The overwhelming majority of our money is devoted to RO1 research. A scientist in a lab has an idea he wants to pursue and writes a grant application. A few times a year the various institutes at NIH convene panels of academic researchers to evaluate the ideas and rank order them. We then issue grants based on the rank order.”

This is one of the many reasons that, when it comes to real innovation, most of it originates in the academic labs, funded by the taxpayers. It’s also one of the reasons that the boards of biotech start up companies are heavily populated with top NIH funded researchers. The bright line between public and private efforts on the research front exists only as a very dim separation in some areas, if at all.

While I consider myself a pro-market and pro-consumer conservative, specialized medical research is one area where government funding is still needed. And to be honest, I see no inconsistency between holding that view and also holding the view that a government takeover of our health insurance system is a bad idea. McArdle intends for the point of her post to be about the nationalized health care system, but talking about government-funded advanced medical research is an entirely different arena, and it just doesn’t have anything to do with how our health insurance system is run. It’s a red herring, and what’s more, it’s one still slick from the water.

Y esterday Moe and I with his colleagues in respected corners of the news media who had disparaged Sarah Palin, relying on the rantings from the foulest corners of the blogosphere as the basis for their articles. Douthat’s disappointment – along with that of his colleagues McArdle and Goldberg – turned slowly into outrage over the course of the day, as it became clear that much of his frustration was directed at the worst offender of them all: Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is on the extreme edge of the assault on Palin – even as Campbell Brown and others have drastically scaled back their attacks on Palin as they realized their allegations were either unfounded, irrelevant, or significant stretches of fact, Sullivan continues to beat the drum. He repeats rumor and innuendo as established truth, but even worse, insists that every tabloidesque rumor be met with immediacy by Palin herself. It’s more than a little pathetic: Andrew Sullivan, once one of the most brilliant wits of the neocon blogosphere, now occupies that darkened zone of the tabloid preacher – the streetcorner pamphleteer who cries to all who will hear, “The Government will not respond to my writings the existence of extraterrestrials among us, and THIS LACK OF DENIAL PROVES DEFINITIVELY THAT THEY ARE HERE!”

As Jonathan Last blogs at the fantastic Galley Slaves: Sullivan demanded that he be able to inspect Palin’s amniotic fluid or Trig Palin’s placenta in order to determine the “hidden truth” about Palin’s pregnancy. Sullivan posted repeatedly, writing over and over again – with no basis other than his own expertise in photo analysis and the rantings of bloggers and commenters with no reputation for accuracy – that Palin’s pregnancy was a suspect issue that demanded clarification. Was the baby hers? Who was the father? Was it a faked pregnancy? All were questions that Sullivan insisted needed answering.

In the wake of revelations about Bristol Palin, rendering much of what he argued moot, Sullivan now insists that his continued writings and tabloidesque musings about Trig Palin’s conception and birth aren’t out of bounds at all, merely because the baby exists.

Presumably, they should put it wherever people put babies to keep them out of the public eye.

Sullivan’s public descent into rampaging dementia is frightening, and one wonders what it could possibly signify about his relationship with The Atlantic. I have been public for years in my belief that The Atlantic is the best magazine in America, and it has, as others have noted, a brand built on a century of brilliant writers and the best minds of the literati. Today, Sullivan represents a complete downfall of that brand name – embracing fully the worst kind of speculatory writing, based on nothing more than what he sees on television and receives from adoring fans in his inbox.

Sullivan has had a bizarre series of public loop-de-loops in recent months, primarily motivated by his devout affection for Barack Obama. His insistence on ignoring his own past political views led to a strong back and forth earlier this year, when Pete Wehner – who I know to be a former fan of Sullivan’s writings before the man went nuts – showed how Sullivan’s current claims completely conflicted with everything he’d once written about the war on terror. To which Sullivan, after much ridiculousness in response, could only respond: “I was deceived and feel terrible responsibility for my naivete.”

Perhaps someday Andrew Sullivan will say he feels deceived by the Andrew Sullivan he is today, and feel terrible responsibility for believing the rantings of the nuttiest members of the online left. But until that day, if it ever comes, he will keep up his courageous quest, insisting that he is just “posing questions,” that he has no bias on this point but a search for hidden, dirty, scandalous truth. He will ask the tough questions, the hard questions, the questions he can ask about medical practice and birth because of his long history as an OB-GYN, an educated nurse, and the handsomest midwife in the tristate area.

The Atlantic sure is getting what it’s paying for.

originally posted at redstate