Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani insists he doesn’t want to be a vice-presidential pick on a GOP ticket in 2012, suggesting that Vice President Joe Biden looked like a puppet during President Obama’s jobs speech.
In an interview with NBC New York Friday, the one-time Republican presidential candidate said the no. 2 job is not for him.
“I think Biden must have a sore neck by now,” Giuliani said. “He was shaking his head so much it looked like he was on a string. It would be hard to sit there and shake your head all the time.”
America’s Mayor has never been one to mince his words.
Bone drugs from Warner Chilcott Plc, Roche Holding AG, Merck & Co. and Novartis AG need labeling changes to reduce the risk of fractures, a U.S. panel said.
The companies should add clarifications on the length of time that osteoporosis patients may take the medicines, outside advisers to the Food and Drug Administration said today in a 17- 6 vote in Adelphi, Maryland. The FDA isn’t required to follow its panels’ recommendations.
The agency has evaluated the safety of the drugs, known as bisphosphonates, for almost four years and cited possible links to unusual thigh fractures and jawbone deterioration in 2010. The agency said in July it also was examining conflicting studies on whether bisphosphonate pills such as Warner Chilcott’s Actonel, Merck’s Fosamax and Roche’s Boniva raise esophageal cancer risks.
A revised label should “be very clear that efficacy may fall off after a period of time, perhaps five years,” panelist Lewis Nelson, director of the medical toxicology fellowship program at New York University, said after the vote. “Serious concerns have been raised about risk, and those need to be continually evaluated as well.”
There needs to be additional research, period.
Mere warning labels are not going to answer the questions from every day patients – how long do I take the medicine and what protocol do I use? Or, what is the chance my femur will fracture or will I develop osteonecrosis of the jaw (ONJ) if I have a tooth removed.
These are my links for September 8th through September 9th:
Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams – Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced annotations.
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Read it all
How Political Operatives Use Astrotweeting to Spread Lies About Candidates- As part of my research for The Voting Wars, I have been reading a great deal of computer science and related research on Twitter and politics. Some of the most interesting work is coming out of Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing.The research on astrotweeting, though too tangential to my book, is worth flagging for readers. In this paper, the authors describe how political operatives set up fake accounts to spread rumors or false statements about candidates. This is done in a way to make it appear as though the information is coming from numerous sources, to convey the impression that the information is reliable. Here is a description of one such effort the researchers uncovered:=======
Barack Obama’s approval rating in North Carolina has fallen to 43%, with 53% of voters disapproving of him. That’s the lowest PPP has found in monthly polling of the state since the weekend before last year’s general election when Democrats were annihilated at the polls.
Obama’s got 2 big problems: independents and a loss of support with his party base. Only 31% of independent voters think he’s doing a good job to 62% who disapprove. He was at an already bad 38/56 a month ago and things have only gotten worse for him. Obama’s other issue is that he’s losing support from Democrats. He was at 79/16 and now he’s down to 75/20. He also has only a 7% approval with Republicans but that’s really par for the course at this point- we’re well beyond the point where he can expect to get any support across party lines.
Despite Obama’s atrocious approval numbers he remains competitive with Rick Perry and Mitt Romney in the state, at least on the surface. He’s tied with Perry at 46% and holds the smallest of advantages over Romney at 45-44. Those numbers aren’t as rosy for Obama as they appear to be though. Only 5% of the undecideds in the Perry match up approve of him to 83% who disapprove and on the generic legislative ballot they support Republicans by a 57-21 margin. It’s a similar story in the match up with Romney. The undecideds there disapprove of Obama by a 10/81 spread and support a generic Republican 62-14. When those folks come off the fence they’re going to be voting GOP which means if the election was today Obama would lose the state.
Looks like North Carolina which Obama won in 2008 is trending toward the GOP. One less key battleground state the Republicans have to contend perhaps.
As the number of key battleground states shrink, the more hotly contested will be the remainder – most notably Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and maybe Florida.
Close to one in 10 Americans say they regularly use illegal drugs, including cocaine, hallucinogens, heroin, inhalants and prescription drugs used recreationally, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, USA Today reports.The most common drug is marijuana, which has around 17.4 million regular users, or 6.9 percent of the U.S. population. That’s up from the 5.8 percent in 2007. The increase corresponds with the number of states — now at 16 — approving medical marijuana.
The good news is that use of methamphetamine use, which exploded around the country for the past 10 years, has plummeted. The number of past-month users dropped from 731,000 in 2006 to reach 353,000 last year.
Since 2001, when methamphetamine began to race around the country, states have restricted or banned ingredients used to make meth, such as the pseudoephedrine often used in over-the-counter cold medications, said Peter Delany, director of the Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
“We’ve seen better attention for law enforcement and policy changes. You can’t get all the Sudafed you want anymore,” said Delany.
The federal government now needs to crack down on the Mexico border, squeeze the Mexican drug cartels that make Meth in Mexico and then smuggle the drug into the USA.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he hopes President Obama’s jobs speech Thursday night will show he is willing to “go to the mat” for workers.
“They [workers] want to see that this president is willing to go to the mat for policies that are going to benefit them, that are going to help create jobs,” said Trumka on ABC’s “Top Line” Thursday, just hours before Obama is set to deliver his proposal to a joint session of Congress.
Trumka said he would specifically like to see the federal government invest in infrastructure, give more aid to state and local governments to help stem layoffs and approve an extension of unemployment insurance.
He told “Top Line” that in order to have a successful speech tonight, Obama needs to look like a leader and show American workers he is willing to fight for them.
Well, we did hear a combative President last night in his speech. He is now executing Big Labor’s orders.
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